FREDERIC

BARTLETT by Vivien Kibitz

University of New York in Prague
 October 20, 1886, UK - September 30, 1969, UK

BACKGRO British psychologist and the first professor of

UND
experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge

Known for his contributions to cognitive and cultural

psychology

Elected to the Royal Society in 1932 and was knighted in

1948

Published over 200 titles

 Bartlett's
Education
Life Labs Love Life
• 1912 - helped open experimental psych. • Married fellow researcher Emily
• St. John's College - logic and
lab Mary Smith he met in the lab
philosophy
• 1914 - relief director of the lab
• His interest gradually turned to
• several studies on memory and
anthropology and psychology due to
perception in people from other cultures
W.H.R. Rivers

Career Royal Society Knighthood

• 1924- editor of the British Journal of • elected in 1932, rare distinction • 1948 for his services to the Royal
Psychology for a psychologist Air Force
• 1931 - elected as first professor of
experimental psychology at
Cambridge
 • Rejected the use of nonsense syllables to isolate the
memory process from other cognitive and social
factors, regarding those influences as essential to
understanding human memory

Role in • Bartlett preferred scientific methods but he

recognized that human beings use more than

Psycholo
mechanical processes in remembering information

gy
• The storage of memories is not simple and localized
⚬ involves schemata = cognitive constructs
impacted by attitudes and past experiences,
social situation and cultural factors
 1 1923 - Psychology and Primitive Culture

Most 2 1927 - Psychology and the Soldier

Important 3 1932 - Remembering

Works
4 1934 - The Problem of Noise
 Remembering: A Study in Experimental
and Social Psychology (1932)

• influence of social factors • laid the foundation for • developed 3 methods:

on memory (recall and
reconstruction)
• attention to interests,
personal attitudes, social
conventions on recall
schema theory and ⚬ the description method, the
pioneered the study of repeated reproduction
memory distortions method, and the serial
reproduction method
 • not like a tape recorder

reconstru •
•
•
not perfectly formed
more like a notebook - only main points written down
people interpret the points and fill in the gaps

ctiveME
themselves
• rationalisation = altering something so it makes sense
• confabulation = filling in the gaps in memory

MORY
reconstru • memory of an event - involves info from specific traces
encoded at the time of the event and the ideas that the person
has from knowledge, expectations, beliefs and attitudes

ctiveME
• remembering = retrieving knowledge modified to fit with
knowledge that the person already has
• crucial for understanding EWT
• recall subject to personal interpretation influenced by cultural

MORY
values and norms
• recall and interpret what we see based on what is our idea of
what is normal for the given situation
• schemas may be influenced by prejudice
“Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed,
lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative
reconstruction or construction, built out of the relation of our
attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past
reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail
F. Bartlett
which commonly appears in image or in language form.”
 Schema 03

01Theory
aim:
• examine the impact of schemas on
memory and the extent of how
reconstructive memory is
results:
• participants remembered the main ideas
but shorter
• unfamiliar events changed using
rationalisation in terms of their own
culture
02 • memory = active process influenced by
experiences and knowledge of the world

method: = schemas

• participants read a short story and rewrote

it based on their memory over months
 Referen
ces
Broadbent, D. E. (1970). Frederic Charles Bartlett, 1886-1969. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society,
16, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1970.0001

Carbon, C.-C., & Albrecht, S. (2012). Bartlett's schema theory: The unreplicated “Portrait d'homme” series from 1932.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(11), 2258–2270. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2012.696121

da Silva, J.R. (2021, November 11). Sir Frederic Bartlett and the method of description. Psychology Today. Retrieved
December 1, 2022, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-memory-factory/202111/sir-frederic-bartlett-
and-the-method-description

Sack, H. (2016, October 20). Frederic Bartlett and experimental psychology. SciHi Blog. Retrieved December 1, 2022,
from http://scihi.org/frederic-bartlett/

Wagoner, B. (2013). Bartlett’s concept of schema in reconstruction. Theory & Psychology, 23(5), 553–575.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354313500166
THANK YOU!