In an investigation into the process of retrieval from very long term memory, four subjects who had been out of high school from 4 to 19 years were asked to think aloud while attempting to recall the names of their high school classmates. The retrievals were found to be characterized by overshoot, systematic hypothesizing, fabrications, the establishment of search contexts, self-corrections, and the use of a number of basic search strategies. These phenomena, as well as an array of traditional memory phenomena, can be understood on the basis of an interpretation of retrieval as a reconstructive problem solving process. Information about the target item is used to construct a description of some aspect of the item, which is used to recover a new fragment of information about the item; from this information a new description can be formed to retrieve still more information, and so on until the piece of information sought is recovered. Three subprocesses may be identified: finding a context for the search, searching, and verifying that what has been recovered is about the target item. (Author/GW)