The conceit is that the entire seven-volume novel consists of the memories triggered by the taste of a madeleine soaked in lime tea.
"I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her concoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give to me.
Immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents..." The Associationist School of philosophical psychologists sought to explain redintegration (among other memory-related phenomena) and used it as evidence[clarification needed] supporting their theories.
The effects of long-term knowledge on memory’s trace reconstruction have been shown for both visual and auditory presentation and recall.
is the probability of correct redintegration.If the trace is neither intact nor successfully completely redintegrated, person fails to accurately recall the memory.
[5] Though Schweickert indicates that the process of trace redintegration may be facilitated by the context of the situation in which recall takes place (e.g. syntax, semantics), his model does not provide details on the potential influences of such factors.
[6] Their model of the multinomial processing tree included an additional node, which represents a decayed memory.
is the probability of trace being entirely lost.The main criticism of Schweickert's model concerns its discrete nature.
[3][5] The model treats memory in a binomial manner, where a trace can be either intact, leading to correct recall, or partially decayed, with subsequent successful or unsuccessful redintegration.
[3] Moreover, the model does not incorporate the concept of the degree of memory degradation, implying that the level of a trace’s decay does not affect the probability of redintegration.
[5] This issue was approached by Roodenrys and Miller (2008), whose alternative account of redintegration uses constrained Rasch model to portray trace degradation as a continuous process.
The effect is hypothesized to occur due to the differences in the presence and availability of phonological representations.
Contrarily to non-words, words possess stable mental representations of the accompanying sounds.
The lexicality effect is commonly used to support the importance of long-term memory in the redintegration processes.
This has been attributed to the “trace competition”, where errors in redintegration are caused by mistaking the items on the lists.
The effect of phonological similarity on redintegration may differ depending on the position of phenomes shared within the items.
Frequently encountered words are hypothesized to be more accessible for subsequent recall, which facilitates the reconstruction of memory redintegration of the partially degraded trace.
[8] Trace reconstruction appears more accurate for items that contain phoneme combinations frequently represented in the language.
Other factors which have been shown to facilitate redintegration include the ease of item imageability,[3] familiarity with the language,[3] and word concreteness.