Digital ACT Reading Practice Question #1697

As it is used in the passage, the word "malleable" most nearly means: Passage Excerpt (Social Science): For decades, cognitive psychologists treated episodic memory as a filing cabinet where discrete sensory records were archived and retrieved intact. However, recent advances in neuroimaging and reconsolidation research have dismantled this model. When an individual recalls a past event, the hippocampus does not fetch an unalterable video file; rather, it actively reconstructs the memory from distributed cortical fragments, integrating current emotional states and post-event information into the newly encoded trace. In experiments by Dr. Aris Thorne, participants recalling emotional scenes under mild stress incorporated inaccurate cues introduced by interviewers at twice the rate of unstressed controls. This malleable nature of memory suggests that remembering is an ongoing generative process prioritizing semantic coherence over historical fidelity.