In social psychology, a transmission chain is when information is passed between people sequentially, each person in the chain usually modifying the information they were given.
This is similar to the telephone game (known as Chinese whispers in some countries).
[3] Bartlett's pioneering book, Remembering describes a series of studies of transmission of various material, from Native American folk tales to descriptions of sporting events.
From these he made two major inferences, corroborated by later studies: loss of the detail and dependence of the quality of remembering on the pre-existing knowledge.
From these he inferred that remembering is a process of reconstruction of information, rather than of replication.