Abstract.—A retroactive interference paradigm was employed for studying qualitative memory changes. The name given to an ambiguous visual figure after presentation influenced reproduction and, to a lesser extent, recognition of the figure, indicating that retroactive definition of meaning may lead to memory changes. The relation between the subject's own conception of the meaning of the figure and the name given by the experimenter involved several types of meaning retroaction, which were related to the results on the remembering tasks. The usual interpretation—in line with the permanent‐memory hypothesis—attributing changed reproductions either to perceptual change or to interference with the activity of drawing, is not accepted, and a contextual theory of memory is su