Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Frederic C. Bartlett (1886-1969) was Britain's most outstanding psychologist between the World Wars. He was a cognitive psychologist long before the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. His three major contributions to current cognitive science are a methodological argument for the study of "ecologically valid" experimental tasks, a reconstructive approach to human memory, and the theoretical construct of the "schema" to represent generic knowledge.
Receiving a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of London (1909), Bartlett carried out additional undergraduate work in the moral sciences at Cambridge University (1914), where he later became director of the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory (1922) and was eventually appointed the first Professor of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge (1931). He was made Fellow of the Royal Society in 1932 and knighted in 1948.
Bartlett's unique position in the development of psychology derived in part from his multidisciplinary background. At London and also later at Cambridge, Bartlett was influenced by the philosophy of James Ward and George Stout (Bartlett 1936), who developed systems that were antiatomist and antiassociationist, as opposed to the traditional British empiricist view. At Cambridge, Bartlett's major intellectual influences were C. S. Myers and W. H. R. Rivers. Although both had been trained as physicians, Myers was an experimental psychologist and Rivers a cultural and physical anthropologist when Bartlett studied with them there. It was Myers who introduced Bartlett to German laboratory psychology with a particular focus on PSYCHOPHYSICS.
His work with Rivers had a strong impact on Bartlett's thinking. He published a number of books and papers devoted to social issues and the role of psychology in anthropological research (Harris and Zangwill 1973). The anthropological study of the conventionalization of human cultural artifacts over time served as a principal source of Bartlett's ideas about schemata. Recently social constructivists (Costall 1992) have argued that if psychology had followed Bart lett's early writings on these topics, the field would now be much more of a social-based discipline than it is.
As a young faculty member, Bartlett had extensive interactions with the neurologist Henry Head. While Bartlett never directly concerned himself with neurophysiological research (Broadbent 1970; Zangwill 1972), he provided intellectual support for a number of students who went on to become the first generation of British neuropsychologists (e.g., Oliver Zangwill, Brenda Milner). Bartlett's discussions with Henry Head about physiological "schemata" (used to account for aspects of human posture) was another important source of Bartlett's thinking on the psychological construct of "schema" (cf. Bartlett 1932).
Through a complex series of events that occurred late in his career, Bartlett had a direct hand in initiating the information -processing framework that is a major component of current cognitive science. During World War II, a brilliant young student named Kenneth Craik came to Cambridge to work with Bartlett. Craik carried out early work on control engineering and cybernetics, only to be killed in a bicycle accident the day before World War II ended. Bartlett was able to see the importance of Craik's approach and took over its development. Donald BROADBENT, in his autobiography (1980), notes that when he arrived at Cambridge after the war, he was exposed to a completely original point of view about how to analyze human behavior. Broadbent went on to develop the first information-processing box models of human behavior (cf. Weiskrantz 1994).
Bartlett worked on applied problems throughout his career, believing that in an effort to isolate and gain control of psychological processes, much laboratory research in psychology missed important phenomena that occurred in more natural settings. This argument for ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY (e.g., Neisser 1978) makes up an important subtheme in current cognitive science (see also ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY).
Bartlett's methodological preference for ecologically valid tasks led him to reject the traditional approach to the study of human memory that involved learning lists of nonsense syllables. In his book Remembering (1932), Bartlett reported a series of memory studies that used a broader range of material, including texts of folktales from Native American cultures. Bartlett focused not on the number of correct words recalled, but on the nature of the changes made in the recalls. He found that individuals recalling this type of material made inferences and other changes that led to a more concise and coherent story (conventionalization). Overall, Bartlett concluded that human memory is not a reproductive but a reconstructive process. Although Bart-lett's approach made little impact on laboratory memory research at the time, with the advent of the cognitive revolution (e.g., Neisser 1967), his ideas became an integral part of the study of human MEMORY, and by the early 1980s, his book Remembering was the second most widely cited work in the area of human memory (White 1983).
To account for his memory data, Bartlett developed the concept of the "schema" (see SCHEMATA). He proposed that much of human knowledge consists of unconscious mental structures that capture the generic aspects of the world (cf. Brewer and Nakamura 1984). He argued that the changes he found in story recall could be accounted for by assuming that "schemata" operate on new incoming information to fill in gaps and rationalize the resulting memory representation. Bartlett's schema concept had little impact on memory research in his lifetime, and, in fact, at the time of his death, his own students considered it to have been a failure (Broadbent 1970; Zangwill 1972). However, the schema construct made an impressive comeback in the hands of computer scientist Marvin Minsky. In the early stages of the development of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Minsky was concerned about the difficulty of designing computer models to exhibit human intelligence. He read Bartlett's 1932 book and concluded that humans were using top-down schema-based information to carry out many psychological tasks. In a famous paper, Minsky (1975) proposed the use of frames (i.e., schemata) to capture the needed top-down knowledge. In its new form, the schema construct has widely influenced psychological research on human memory (Brewer and Nakamura 1984) and the field of AI.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bartlett, F. C. (1936). Frederic Charles Bartlett. In C. Murchison, Ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 3. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, pp. 39-52.
Brewer, W. F., and G. V. Nakamura. (1984). The nature and functions of schemas. In R. S. Wyer, Jr., and T. K. Srull, Eds., Handbook of Social Cognition, vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 119-160.
Broadbent, D. E. (1970). Frederic Charles Bartlett. In Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 16. London: Royal Society, pp. 1-13.
Broadbent, D. E. (1980). Donald E. Broadbent. In G. Lindzey, Ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 7. San Francisco: Freeman, pp. 39-73.
Costall, A. (1992). Why British psychology is not social: Frederic Bartlett"s promotion of the new academic discipline. Canadian Psychology 33:633-639.
Harris, A. D., and O. L. Zangwill. (1973). The writings of Sir Frederic Bartlett, C.B.E., F.R.S.: An annotated handlist. British Journal of Psychology 64:493-510.
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P. H. Winston, Ed., The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 211-277.
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Neisser, U. (1978). Memory: What are the important questions? In M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris, and R. N. Sykes, Eds., Practical Aspects of Memory. London: Academic Press, pp. 3-14.
Weiskrantz, L. (1994). Donald Eric Broadbent. In Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 40. London: Royal Society, pp. 33-42.
White, M. J. (1983). Prominent publications in cognitive psychology. Memory and Cognition 11:423-427.
Zangwill, O. L. (1972). Remembering revisited. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 24:123-138.
Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology