The Repeated Reproduction of Bartlett's Remembering: History of Psychology December 2001

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The Repeated Reproduction of Bartlett's Remembering
Article in History of Psychology · December 2001

DOI: 10.1037//1093-4510.4.4.341 · Source: PubMed
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History of Psychology Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation
2001, Vol. 4, No. 4, 341-366 1093-4510A)1/$5.00 DO1: 10.1037//1093-4510.4.4.341
THE REPEATED REPRODUCTION OF

BARTLETT'S REMEMBERING
Elizabeth B. Johnston
Sarah Lawrence College
There is a striking parallel between the treatment of F. C. Bartlett's theories of

memory in the psychological literature and Bartlett's own characterization of
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
reproductive memory as interest driven and constructive. Three periods of intensi-

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
fied interest in Bartlett's classic book Remembering (1932/1995) can be identified.

The 1st occurred in the wake of the publication of Remembering and focused on
replication and extension of the empirical work. The 2nd was during the period of
the "cognitive revolution" and treated Bartlett' s key theoretical concept of "schema"
within an information-processing framework. The 3rd is an ongoing revitalization of
interest in the cultural and social aspects of Bartlett's multifaceted theory. Each
wave of increased interest in Bartlett's work has brought different aspects of his
thinking to the fore, producing different versions of his theory of remembering that
reflect the theoretical climate of the time.
Interest in Bartlett's (1932/1995) book Remembering has been lively since its
publication in 1932. Psychologists have revisited Bartlett's work at regular
intervals and reproduced the experiments with variations and elaborations (All-
port & Postman, 1947; Bergman & Roediger, 1999; Edwards & Middleton, 1987;
Gauld & Stephenson, 1967; Gomulicki, 1956; Johnson, 1962; Kay, 1955; Man-
dler & Johnson, 1977; Northway, 1936; Oldfield & Zangwill, 1942,1943a, 1943b,
1943c; Paul, 1959; Roediger, Wheeler, & Rajaram, 1993; Saito, 1996, 2000;
Wheeler & Roediger, 1992; Wynn & Logic, 1998). It is notable in this era of short
print life spans that the book has been reissued twice, in 1964 and 1995. It has
been consistently referred to as a classic in the one- to two-page descriptions
provided in the majority of introductory and cognitive psychology texts, from the
time of its publication to the present day. .
Bartlett's experimental technique was to ask his research participants to
repeatedly reproduce drawings, stories, or prose passages. His most famous
material is a North American folk tale entitled The War of the Ghosts that he
appropriated from Boas (Beals, 1998;1 Boas, 1901; see Appendix for Bartlett's
Elizabeth B. Johnston studied psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, then
completed a DPMI in visual psychophysics in the Department of Physiology at Oxford University
in England. She currently teaches experimental psychology at Sarah Lawrence College. Her main
research interest is reconstructive memory.
I am very grateful to my friends and colleagues Ron Cagenello, Charlotte Doyle, Mary Porter,
Lyde Sizer, and Pauline Watts for their constructive and critical readings of a draft of this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Elizabeth B. Johnston, Depart-
ment of Psychology, Sarah Lawrence College, 1 Mead Way, Bronxville, New York 10708.
Electronic mail may be sent to ebj@slc.edu.
1
On tracking down the Boas publication I found that there were two versions of The War oj
the Ghosts provided. Bartlett adopted and altered the version with the least mention of motivation
and emotion and sanitized it further. Beals (1998) provided a detailed analysis of the differences
among the three versions.
341
342 JOHNSTON
version of the story). Bartlett used two techniques: (a) the method of repeated
reproduction, in which his participants were asked to provide a number of
renditions of the tale, at long intervals, as much as 10 years in one case, and (b)
the method of serial reproduction, fashioned after the parlor game of "Russian
Scandal," or "Telephone" as it was later known, in which participants passed
along the story in a chain (Bartlett, 1958).
Bartlett's famous reproduction technique has been re-enacted in the psycho-
logical literature with Bartlett's work as the text. The purpose of this article is to
set out the ways in which the principles of remembering outlined by Bartlett
provide appropriate descriptions of the subsequent treatment of his work. This
necessitates another revisiting of Bartlett to provide my version of his findings.

Bartlett's Findings in Historical Context

If I am to say what sort of psychologist I am, I think I can say only that I am a
Cambridge psychologist. The trouble about this is that Cambridge psychology of
the laboratory type has never committed itself to any hard and fast and settled
scheme of psychological explanation. I hope it never will. (Bartlett, 1936, p. 40)
It is clear from both Crampton's (1978) doctoral thesis and Bartlett's writings
on Cambridge psychology (Bartlett, 1936,1937, 1955, 1956) that a group of four
fellow Cambridge men profoundly influenced the development of Bartlett's
thought: James Ward, W. H. R. Rivers, C. S. Myers, and Henry Head.2 This close
intellectual community of early 20th-century Cambridge, England, was vital in
the formation of Bartlett's ideas and his subsequent independence from other
schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and Gestalt psychology.
James Ward (1843-1925) was Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at
Cambridge when Bartlett came as an undergraduate student in 1909. Ward had
studied with Lotze in Gottingen, Germany; Lotze's Medicinische Psychologic,
oder Physiologie der Seele ("Medical Psychology, or The Physiology of the
Soul") was one of the early texts that contributed to forming the discipline of
psychology through an integration of philosophy and physiology. Ward brought
the work of the new German experimental tradition to Britain by translating the
work of Weber and Fechner on psychophysics. Prior to his undergraduate work at
Cambridge Bartlett reported traveling 18 miles a week to the nearest public library
to read Ward's famous article on "Psychology" in Encyclopedia Britannica in
installments. Bartlett described this article as "the first important discussion of
psychology in England to pay generous and appreciative notice to a mass of
experimental work, then only recently performed" (Bartlett, 1937, p. 98). In this
widely read article Ward attacked atomistic associationism and developed a new
psychology that emphasized the role of the active organizing subject (Brett,
1921). Northway (1940a) described Bartlett's psychology as essentially Wardian,
and Ward's influence is plain in several aspects of the view of memory Bartlett
put forward in Remembering.
First, memory is an active, dynamic, inferential process that is better charac-
terized as constructive than reproductive. Bartlett begins his summary of the
2
Henry Head spent most of his career at the famous National Hospital for the Paralysed and
Epileptic in Queen Square, London. He was a student at Cambridge and later spent a lot of time there
while collaborating with W. H. R. Rivers on their experiment on nerve division.
BARTLETT'S REMEMBERING 343
repeated reproduction results with this point: "Accuracy of reproduction, in a

literal sense, is the rare exception and not the rule"3(Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 93).
This constructive process was memorably described by Bartlett thus: "It is fitting
to speak of every human cognitive reaction—perceiving, imaging, remembering,
thinking and reasoning—as an effort after meaning" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 44).
The constructive nature of recall leads to the following changes in any reproduc-
tion of material: omissions, condensations, elaborations, transpositions, transfor-
mations, and, less frequently, importations. As a counterpoint to his focus on
invention and importation, Bartlett recognized the strong countervailing tendency
of his participants to stereotypy. In summarizing the repeated reproduction ex-
periments, Bartlett stated: "The most general characteristic of the whole of this
group of experiments was the persistence, for any given subject, of the 'form' of
his first reproduction" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 83).
Ward's focus on the active subject is also apparent in the attention Bartlett
paid to individual attitudes and responses. Bartlett was fascinated by the effect of
"established interests" on subsequent recall. The text of Remembering is full of
examples of people's occupations directing their perceptions and memory: Early
on Bartlett (1932/1995) discussed the hypothetical example of the differences in
what is noted by a landscape artist, a naturalist, and a geologist walking in the
country (p. 4); a mathematician noted that a squiggle reminds him of a determi-
nant and recalled it accurately several weeks later (p. 21); a minister saw
Nebuchadnezzer's fiery furnace in an inkblot (p. 38); the same blot reminded a
physiologist of "an exposure of the basal lumbar region of the digestive system as
far back as the vertebral column up to the floating ribs" (p. 38); an anthropologist
who later specialized in kinship rationalized the ghosts of The War of the Ghosts
story as a clan name (pp. 69-70); a painter visualized the whole scene of The War
of the Ghosts and drew a plan of his imagery (p. 72); a Swazi cattle herdsman
demonstrated remarkably accurate memory for a group of cattle purchased a year
previously (pp. 249-251); and a geologist turned mining engineer produced a
good copy of a map of an area of the Belgian Congo he had prospected more than
a year earlier (pp. 251-252). These examples contribute to the liveliness and interest
of the text and point to Bartlett's recognition of the importance of expertise for the
study of memory. This theme would later be developed much more fully within the
Newell and Simon cognitive tradition with its emphasis on the role of past experience
in producing experts' ability to meaningfully organize relevant material (Chase &
Simon, 1973; Ericsson, 1985; Ericsson & Simon, 1993; Simon, 1981).
In line with Ward's attack on atomistic associationism, Bartlett explicitly
opposed a trace theory of memory. This is a common and compelling view of the
physical nature of memory that one investigator described as "each separate
experience leaves in the organism a characteristic and distinct physical record,
which retains its separate identity and may, under appropriate conditions, exert a
direct effect on subsequent behavior or permit conscious recall of the original
experience" (Gomulicki, 1953, p. 47). Neisser (1967) coined the term reappear-
ance hypothesis to characterize this viewpoint. Bartlett's antipathy to this view is
evident in the following frequently quoted passage from Remembering:
3
Quotations from Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, by F. C.
Bartlett, 1995, New York: Cambridge University Press, are copyright 1995 by Cambridge Univer-
sity Press and reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
344 JOHNSTON
Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmen-

tary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, built out of the relation of our
attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and
to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language
form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote
recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be so. (Bartlett,
1932/1995, p. 213)
The alternative that Bartlett proposed is schema, a term he used to refer to the
influence of prior knowledge and predispositions in the active organization and
subsequent memorability of new material. Bartlett explicitly acknowledged the
Cambridge neurologist Henry Head (1861-1940) as the inspiration for this

theoretical innovation (Bartlett, 1932/1995, pp. 198-200). Although Bartlett

attributed his use of the term schema exclusively to Head, the concept can be
traced back further. Crampton (1978, p. 331) pointed out that it is suggested in the
work of Kant, Lotze, the Wiirzburg school, and the Gestaltists. Bartlett's devel-
opment of the schema concept provides a dynamic view of memory: Any given
schema is continually being transformed in the process of remembering as past
and present experiences interact with the enduring interests and attitudes of the
individual. The concept of the memory schema is one of the most important
reasons for Bartlett's continuing influence (Brewer, 2000).
Bartlett's opposition to trace theory led to an equally strong abhorrence of the
methodology that sprang from that viewpoint: Ebbinghaus's famous studies of the
laws of memorization, uncovered using series of nonsense syllables as the stimuli4
(Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964; Murray, 1976). The first chapter of Remembering con-
tains an incisive critique of Ebbinghaus's assumption of a simple correspondence
between stimulus and response that disregards the human engagement with "effort
after meaning." Referring to Ebbinghaus, Bartlett stated: "His ideals were the
simplification of stimuli and the isolation of response. He secured the first by
using nonsense syllables as his memory material, and the second he curiously
thought, followed immediately" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 2). In opposition to
Ebbinghaus's approach, Bartlett concentrated his efforts on meaningful stimuli
that more closely approximated the types of'material that people have to remem-
ber in everyday life:
I endeavoured, in this series of experiments, to avoid as far as possible the
artificiality which often hangs over laboratory experiments in psychology. I
therefore discarded the use of nonsense syllables and throughout employed ma-
terial a part of which, ar least, might fairly be regarded as interesting and
sufficiently normal for the subjects concerned not to force upon them ad hoc
modes of observation and of recall. (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 47)
This is an early statement of an enduring and important controversy in the
memory literature: the everyday-laboratory memory debate (Banaji & Crowder,
1989; Neisser, 1978).
4
Ebbinghaus also learned a few cantos of Byron's Don Juan to investigate whether his
methods applied to material that made sense. He found no greater range of distribution of his simple
numerical measures, but the learning took only one-tenth the time, demonstrating the "extraordinary
advantage which the combined ties of meaning, rhythm, rhyme and a common language give to
material to be memorised" (Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964, p. 51).
BARTLETTS REMEMBERING 345
Whereas Ward can be considered the most important influence on the early
development of Bartlett's theoretical approach to psychology, W. H. R. Rivers
(1864-1921) and C. S. Myers (1873-1946) were crucial to the formation of his
interests. Both Rivers and Myers were physicians turned psychologists with
training in the rigorous psychophysics of the German school. In addition to their
extensive work in experimental psychology Rivers and Myers both treated psy-
chiatric patients as their World War I service. Myers coined the term shell shock
to refer to the mental distress and disorder that resulted from front-line experience
and advocated psychotherapeutic treatment. Rivers and Myers were familiar with
Freud's writings and "agreed that supportive psychotherapy and the recovery of
repressed memories were the keys to cure shell shock" (Crampton, 1978, p. 204).
The effect of this clinical work on Bartlett's conception of memory is not

explicitly discussed at any point hi Remembering, but the following quotation
lends weight to the notion that it formed part of the background of Bartlett's
thinking:
If the experimentalist in psychology once recognizes that he remains to a great
extent a clinician, he is forced to realize that the study of any well developed
psychological function is possible only in the light of a consideration of its history.
(Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 15)
The developmental—or genetic—focus in the above quotation also hints at
continuities between Bartlettian and Piagetian psychology. Their common use of
the key theoretical concept of schema reinforces this association.
A distinct and more important influence of Rivers on the formation of
Bartlett's psychology was to stimulate his interest hi anthropology. Inspired by
Rivers's work on kinship, Bartlett initially wanted to become an anthropologist
rather than a psychologist, but Rivers persuaded Bartlett that a training in
psychophysical methods was the best foundation. Because of many factors, such
as his need to head up Cambridge psychology during World War I, Bartlett never
realized his anthropological ambitions, but a deep interest in social aspects of
human behavior permeated all of his later work. The importance Bartlett placed
on the social determination of remembering is apparent in this summary state-
ment: "The data presented in the first part of this book have repeatedly shown that
both the manner and the matter of recall are often predominantly determined by
social influences" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 244). Bartlett's desire to integrate
cognition and culture is another key reason for the continuing interest hi his work.
A recent edited collection entitled Bartlett, Culture & Cognition (Saito, 2000) is
evidence of this current focus. In his foreword to this text Bruner (2000, p. xv)
noted that it is fitting that Bartlett's work provides the rubric for bringing cultural
and cognitive psychology back together or, if not "together," at least within the
pages of a single book.
Bartlett Redux
Although interest hi Bartlett's memory work has been ongoing since its first
publication, there are peaks where the focus, re-examination, and reproduction are
more intensive. The first wave of increased interest during the 1940s and 1950s
largely focused on replication of the empirical work and the consequent extension
and modification of Bartlett's theories. In retrospect, the publication of Gauld and
346 JOHNSTON
Stephenson's (1967) article documenting a failure to replicate Bartlett's serial

reproduction results closed the era of empirical reworkings of Bartlett's memory
experiments. A number of contemporary memory researchers refer to this article
as proof that Bartlett's findings from the method of repeated reproduction have
not been replicated (Roediger, 1996; Schacter, 1996). Yet, in the same year,
Neisser reignited interest in Bartlett's theoretical framework in his groundbreak-
ing Cognitive Psychology, a book that was instrumental in defining and estab-
lishing the field it named. Early in that text Neisser stated:
The present approach is more closely related to that of Bartlett (1932, 1958) than
to any other contemporary psychologist, while its roots are at least as old as the
"act psychology" of the nineteenth century. The central assertion is that seeing,
hearing, and remembering are all acts of construction. (Neisser, 1967, p. 10)
This second wave initiated by Neisser is characterized by the cognitive
emphasis of the memory field at that time, and the work was pursued within the
context of the field's intense focus on information-processing models and the
consequent representation of semantic memory as computerlike tree structures.
During this period Mandler and Johnson (1977) provided a structural analysis of
the story grammar of The War of the Ghosts and gave a more specific and
restrictive meaning to Bartlett's concept of schemata. Another set of experimental
studies that contributed to the heightened attention to Bartlett's constructive
memory theory in the 1970s was the work of Bransford and his colleagues on
comprehension. In some story comprehension experiments examining the role of
the title in setting a context for the whole passage, Bransford and Johnson (1972)
demonstrated constructive recall effects akin to those discovered by Bartlett. In
addition, Bransford and Franks (1971, 1972) provided extensive and clear exper-
imental demonstrations of associative rather than literal recall of sentences.
The third increase in attention to Bartlett's Remembering is ongoing. Remem-
bering came back into print in 1995, and several articles on Bartlett's memory
work have been published in the last 15 years. At least three distinct strands in
contemporary psychological inquiry contribute to this third wave of interest: (a)
the Vygotskian emphasis on cultural and social aspects of cognition, spearheaded
by members of the Laboratory of Comparative and Human Cognition (Cole,
1996); (b) the neural net models of memory, proposed by parallel-distributed
processing theorists (McClelland, 1995); and (c) the emphasis on constructive
memory in the bitterly waged recovered/false memory wars (Conway, 1997;
Schacter, Coyle, Fischbach, Mesulam, & Sullivan, 1995).
In each of these waves of Bartlett reproduction the individual and collective
special interests of psychologists have directed their renderings of Bartlett's work.
The theoretical orientations of the researchers who have revisited Bartlett's work
run the gamut: psychoanalytic, Gestalt, information processing, discourse analy-
sis, social, cognitive and anticognitive, and evolutionary perspectives are all
represented in the crowd of post-Bartlettians. In line with Bartlett's theorizing,
psychologists have omitted details and points that they found incomprehensible or
inconsequential from their own theoretical perspective; as in The War of the
Ghosts story renditions, these omissions are not neutral; rather, they transform
what remains. The "outstanding detail" that forms the basis of each reproduction
is determined as much by the interests and attitudes of the experimenters as by the
original stimulus, in this case Bartlett's text. A strong tendency to rationalize, to
make sense of the material in line with current interests and emphases, is evident
in the work of many Bartlett revisitors. This point was made by one of the early
reviewers of Remembering: "Quite in accord with Bartlett's own thesis, each
reader of this book will perceive, recall, and evaluate the contents differently"
(Stone, 1934, p. 103). In each of the waves of Bartlett revisiting that I have
identified Stone's (1934) thesis is amply confirmed. Each revisiting produces a
new rendering of Bartlett's Remembering formed through an interaction of the
individual researcher's interests and predilections with the current intellectual
climate and preoccupations.
First Wave
After the publication of Remembering several studies, most of them experi-

mental, were devoted to the development and critique of the ideas presented by
Bartlett. In a series of theoretical review articles Oldfield and Zangwill (1942,
1943a, 1943b, 1943c), both former PhD students of Bartlett's, subjected the
schema concept to intense scrutiny. Northway (1936, 1940a, 1940b) extended
Bartlett's experimental work to a different population in her work with elementary
school children and thoroughly examined the concept of schema. Allport and
Postman (1947) applied Bartlett's serial reproduction method to the topic of
rumor and introduced the Gestalt-inspired terminology of sharpening and leveling
to the constructive process. Gomulicki (1956), under the direction of Zangwill,
studied immediate reproduction of short prose passages and emphasized the
abstractive processes that accounted for the selectivity of omissions. Kay (1955)
examined the longevity of participants' versions of two prose passages under
conditions of repeated exposure to the original passage. Paul (1959) examined
serial reproductions of Bartlett's version of The War of the Ghosts plus a more
coherent version of the same story. Johnson (1962) replicated Bartlett's method of
repeated reproduction with The War of the Ghosts and analyzed his results in
terms of the Gestalt categories of sharpening and normalization. Gauld and
Stephenson (1967) repeated Bartlett's serial reproduction experiment with more
stringent participant instructions and found fewer errors under these conditions.
Affective Determination: Paul (1959)

A clear example of an interest-driven rendering of Bartlett's theory is found
in one of the earliest and most extensive replications of Bartlett's serial repro-
duction experiments. Irving Paul was a research fellow at the Austen Riggs Center
when he conducted these experiments, and he published his results in a psycho-
analytically oriented journal (Paul, 1959). At the outset of the article Paul declared
his indebtedness to psychoanalyst David Rapaport, author of Emotion and Mem-
ory (Rapaport, 1942). Rapaport shared Bartlett's constructive view of memory
and, like Bartlett, he opened his discussion with a critique of the poverty of the
concept of memory used in the classical memory experiments. Rapaport may have
been referring to Bartlett's work in the following passage:
It has recently been emphasized that recall is not simply a revival of traces
imprinted in us somewhere, nor is forgetting simply a fading of that imprint.
Reproduction is rather an active production, and forgetting also fundamentally
implies an active principle. Finally, and most essentially, learning, retention, and
recall are inextricably interrelated, operating simultaneously in every moment of
348 JOHNSTON
our lives. The classical memory experiments, trying to isolate and measure these
functions, demonstrate only how memory can function under given laboratory
conditions and not how it does function in everyday life. (Rapaport, 1942, p. 6)
In keeping with Rapaport's influence and his psychoanalytic interests, Paul
emphasized and elaborated on Bartlett's focus on the affective realm: "One of
Bartlett's major theses was that cognitive functioning cannot be understood unless
it is studied in the light of the subject's interests, attitudes, affects and goals"
(Paul, 1959, p. 3). When Paul described the concept of schema he highlighted the
affective component: "A schema is an observation, simplification, and articulation
of experience; part and parcel of its formation and operation are the affective
aspects of the experience" (Paul, 1959, p. 4). Paul found that Bartlett's emphasis
on individual participants' memories and the particulars of each participant's

background and approach to the task resonated with his clinical experience and
training. In keeping with his psychoanalytic background, Paul extended the
analysis initiated by Bartlett to produce a typology of rememberers; he divided
people into importers and skeletonizers and discussed this categorization in terms
of cognitive style.
This focus on individual motivation is, of course, present in Bartlett's work.
In his summary at the end of the chapter on repeated reproduction 5 of the 14
points (7, 8,9,11, and 13) address the participants' attitudes, interests, and affects.
He stated: "[The rationalizing process] tends to possess characteristics peculiar to
the work of the individual who effects it and due directly to his particular
temperament and character" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 94). It is the case, however,
that in Paul's account the emphasis on affective determination and personality
characteristics led to a neglect of other key points in Bartlett's work, yielding a
different theory of memory. The selection and elaboration of the affective and
personality characteristics and consequent downplaying of cognitive schematiza-
tion and social processes in Paul's work is indicative of the interest-driven "effort
after meaning" described by Bartlett. This process can be viewed as distorting, but
Bartlett's point was that it is natural and necessary; every reproduction of an
original must be filtered through the author's own perspective, motivations, and
current goals.
Paul (1959) provided an extensive replication of Bartlett's serial reproduction
experiments. He produced a rationalized version of Bartlett's rendition of The
War of the Ghosts and found that more coherent versions of the story were more
readily and accurately remembered. By providing a story more familiar in context
to his participants, an office tale-for secretaries, Paul was able to demonstrate that
memory for detail was, as Bartlett stated, determined by pre-existing knowledge.
Although Paul's work was a clear replication and extension of Bartlett's findings,
others have reported difficulty reproducing Bartlett's results.
Failure to Replicate?
In some ways a measure of Bartlett's stature is that nobody seriously questions the
factual results of his experiments. His observations can be repeated, and have been
very widely. (Broadbent, 1970, p. 3)
It is curious that Bartlett's (1932) landmark experiments have never been repli-
cated; see Gauld and Stephenson (1967). (Schacter, 1996, p. 320, n. 5)
There clearly is some dissent on this issue.5 As one of the teachers of

experimental psychology who routinely uses Bartlett's The War of the Ghosts
repeated-reproduction experiment as a class assignment, I was puzzled when I
first read Schacter's statement that Bartlett's results have not been replicated. In
reading further I found that many other modern sources concur with Schacter
(Alba & Hasher, 1983; Kintsch, 1995; Roediger, 1996; Roediger et al., 1993; but
see Bergman & Roediger, 1999, for a different view). Tracking down the
provenance of this idea proved to be an illuminating study in the transmission of
the gist of experimental results that again bears out Bartlett's characterization of
the reconstructive transformations that occur in the trafficking of knowledge.
Gauld and Stephenson (1967) is the source cited by many as an instance of the
failure to replicate, but their experiments differed from Bartlett's in important

ways. Their article is usually referred to as though Gauld and Stephenson used the
repeated-reproduction method. For example, Roediger et al. (1993) stated: "In-
terestingly, we can cite only one attempted replication of Bartlett's (1932)
pioneering research—one published by Gauld and Stephenson (1967) and dis-
cussed below—that tried to confirm his claims using the repeated-reproduction
technique" (p. 101). Yet Gauld and Stephenson used only the serial reproduction
version of Bartlett's experiment, with radical alterations to the participant instruc-
tions. Gauld and Stephenson's major focus was the veridicality of memory, so
they entreated some of their participants at length to produce the most accurate
and literal reproductions possible, using statements such as "I want you to look on
this not as a test of memory, but as an exercise in being as scrupulous and honest
as you can in deciding what is and isn't in the original story" (Gauld &
Stephenson, 1967, p. 41).
In calculating errors Gauld and Stephenson (1967) did not include many of
the changes discussed by Bartlett: Most important, omissions were not penalized,
synonyms were accepted, general words were accepted in place of particular ones,
time order errors were ignored, and place name errors were not counted. In Gauld
and Stephenson's words, "We were concerned with falsehood, and the 'error rate'
was designed to indicate the proportion of false or untrue statements in the
reproductions as a whole" (p. 42). With the more stringent set of instructions
participants did produce a significantly lower error rate (2.78) than when they
were simply asked to be as accurate as possible (4.68).
When each participant's reproduction was complete the experimenter read it
back to him or her and asked if there were any phrases about which he or she was
doubtful. When these doubted phrases were excluded from the analysis the error
rate dropped by 42%. Unfortunately, given the form of the data presentation, it is
impossible to tell how many of the doubted phrases were in fact correct, but it is
fair to say that participants could not reliably pick out all of their own errors.
Gauld and Stephenson (1967) clearly had quite a different conception of the
nature of memory than Bartlett. Bartlett emphasized that remembering is "hardly
5
Two early studies by Kay (1955) and Johnson (1962) can be considered replications of
Bartlett's repeated-reproduction experiments, although both authors emphasized different aspects of
the results than Bartlett. Bergman and Roediger (1999) recently provided a carefully controlled
replication of Bartlett's repeated-reproduction experiment and scored it thoroughly and systemati-
cally. Bergman and Roediger concluded that Bartlett's repeated-reproduction results can be
replicated.
350 JOHNSTON
ever really exact" and that "it is not at all important that it should be so," whereas
Gauld and Stephenson focused exclusively on accuracy. They cast the issue in
moral terms:
If a subject does not have a good memory, is not under moral pressure, and is not
conscientious, the urge to tell a story, and to be particular rather than general will
have its way, and he will probably distort the original passage markedly, (p. 48)
Gauld and Stephenson depicted Bartlett as a sloppy experimenter who was
leading his unscrupulous participants with their poor memories astray by not
exerting enough moral pressure on them to be honest and accurate; thus they
"guessed" and "romanced." As Carruthers (1990) detailed in her study of memory

in medieval culture, morality and memory have long been linked:

Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest
geniuses they describe as people of superior memories, they boast unashamedly of
their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior moral
character as well as intellect, (p. 1)
It is interesting that Bartlett's view of memory may have been much closer to
medieval conceptions than Gauld and Stephenson's, with their overarching con-
cern for veridicality. In a later book on meditation, rhetoric, and imagery Car-
ruthers (1998) drew the reader's attention to the differences between modem
conceptions of memory and the monastic art of mneme:
So I must ask of my readers a considerable effort of imagination throughout this
study, to conceive of memory not only as "rote," the ability to reproduce some-
thing (whether a text, a formula, a list of items, an incident) but as the matrix of
a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating "things" stored in a random-
access memory scheme, or set of schemes—a memory architecture and a library
built up during one's lifetime with the express intention that it be used inventively,
(p. 4)
This emphasis on schemes that organize past experience for the purpose of
future uses of the remembered material is consistent with Bartlett's view of
memory, and I discuss at length later hi this article Bartlett's analysis of this
concept.
In many ways this controversy typifies the ongoing laboratory-everyday
memory debate that provides Bartlett's point of departure (chap. 1 of Remember-
ing) and has raged ever since. G^auld and Stephenson (1967) produced a situation
that was quite remote from the normal constraints on memory. In everyday
exchanges of narratives or information, or in autobiographical remembering, there
is no one entreating the person remembering to be scrupulous and ultraconser-
vative. Furthermore, Gauld and Stephenson's claim that participants are able to
detect their own inaccuracies contravenes the whole eyewitness memory body of
work (e.g., Loftus & Loftus, 1980) and current views of false memory (e.g.,
Conway, 1997).
The discrepancy between Gauld and Stephenson and Bartlett highlights that
the everyday-laboratory memory debate is not so much about location, or even
stimulus materials, as it is about the researchers' conception of what memory is
for (Baddeley, 1988). Bartlett's and Gauld and Stephenson's different conceptions
of the purposes of remembering led to differences hi the criteria they set for "good
memory"; for Gauld and Stephenson only accurate (though not verbatim) repro-
duction would do, whereas in Bartlett's view the less literally accurate reproduc-
tion was, and the more it was transformed for the rememberer's own purposes, the
better for his study of reconstructive processes. Bartlett's lasting contribution to
the everyday-laboratory debate is not that he used more realistic materials.
Bartlett knew that a written version of an oral folk tale was a poor representation
of the original story (Bartlett, 1923, p. 62)6 and that the laboratory situation he
produced was clearly artificial. What was more radical was his loosening of the
literal-reproduction criterion of good memory that dominated experimental psy-
chology at the time and his consequent focus on individual interests driving the
development of memory expertise.

Second Wave
Reconstructing Schemata
In the cognitive era that superseded behaviorism in American psychology
during the 1960s and 1970s, Bartlett's concept of the schema found a new
audience (Baars, 1986). Bartlett introduced his notion of memory schemata in
contrast to the prevalent trace theory of memory adhered to by Ebbinghaus.
Bartlett and Ebbinghaus differed fundamentally in the metaphor of memory each
favored. Ebbinghaus made his underlying metaphor clear in the following
passage:
These relations can be described figuratively by speaking of the series as being
more or less deeply engraved in some mental substratum. To carry out this figure:
as the number of repetitions increases, the series are engraved more and more
deeply and indelibly; if the number of repetitions is small, the inscription is but
surface deep and only fleeting glimpses of the tracery can be caught; with a
somewhat greater number the inscription can, for a time at least, be read at will;
as the number of repetitions is still further increased, the deeply cut picture of the
series fades out only after ever longer intervals. (Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964, pp.
52-53)
This engraving metaphor version of a trace theory was consistent with the
stimulus-response theories of behaviorist psychologists so dominant at the time
Bartlett was writing Remembering. The insularity of these traces was what Bartlett
objected to most: the notion that records of past experience are preserved intact,
immune from interaction with each other or new information and experiences.
Instead of considering memories as individual records of events that differed only
in strength, Bartlett conceived of a person's past experiences acting as an
organized mass: "[I]n all relatively simple cases of determination by past expe-
6
Bartlett quoted from Smith and Dale (1920):
It was all good to listen to—impossible to put on paper. Ask him now to repeat the story
slowly so that you may write it. You will with patience, get the gist of it, but the
unnaturalness of the circumstance disconcerts him, your repeated request for the repetition
of a phrase, the absence of encouragement of his friends, and above all, the hampering
slowness of your pen, all combine to kill the spirit of story telling, (p. 336)
See the later section A Bizarre and Disjointed Tale: Mandler and Johnson (1977) for more analysis
of the impoverished nature of Bartlett's story.
352 JOHNSTON
riences and reactions, the past operates as an organized mass rather than as a
group of elements each of which retains its specific character" (Bartlett, 1932/
1995, p. 197).
In contrast to what he characterized as the "lifeless" trace theory, Bartlett
emphasized the active role of a person's attitudes, interests, appetites, feelings,
and values in organizing the material to be remembered. This emphasis on the
individual's activity demonstrates Ward's profound influence on Bartlett's think-
ing. In his obituary of Ward Bartlett drew attention to the effect on Ward of
Lotze's "constant reiteration of the fundamental importance of life and activity"
(Bartlett, 1925, p. 450).
Although the history of Bartlett's emphasis on the active organizational role

played by schemata can be traced through Ward to Lotze, it was the neurologist
Head who inspired Bartlett to use the term schema. Head introduced schema into
the neurological literature to refer to the models of body position that serve to
relate past to present experience in the recognition of postural change. He
conceived of these models as plastic and nonconscious, in contrast to the con-
scious images of past movements assumed by his contemporary, Munk (Oldfield
& Zangwill, 1942, pp. 269-271). Head and his collaborator Gordon Holmes
described the schema concept more fully:
It would be impossible to discover the position of any part of the body, unless the
immediate postural impressions were related to something that had preceded them.
A direct perception of posture, analogous to that of roughness, cannot occur; in
every case, the new position of the limb is related to some previous posture. We
have been able to show that the standard against which a change in posture is
estimated is not an image either visual or motor; it lies outside consciousness.
Every recognizable change in posture enters consciousness already charged with
its relation to something which has gone before, and the final product is directly
perceived as a measured postural change. For this combined standard, against
which all subsequent changes in posture are estimated, before they enter con-
sciousness, we have proposed the word "schema." (Head & Holmes, 1920; cited
in Brain, 1950, pp. 128-129)
Bartlett used this notion of a combined standard built on the basis of past
experience to capture his view that "the past operates as an organized mass."
Following Head, Bartlett used a motor example to illustrate the concept:
Suppose I am making a stroke in a quick game, such as tennis or cricket—When
I make the stroke I do not, as a matter of fact, produce something absolutely new,
and I never merely repeat something old. The stroke is literally manufactured out
of the living visual and postural "schemata" of the moment and their interrelations.
I may say, I may think that I reproduce exactly a series of text-book movements,
but demonstrably I do not; just as, under some other circumstances, I may say and
think that I reproduce exactly some isolated event which I want to remember, and
again demonstrably I do not. (Bartlett, 1932/1995, pp. 201-202)
The schema concept allowed Bartlett to set up an alternative to trace theory
and thereby escape the classic view of memory as the re-excitement of individual
traces of past experiences. Bartlett was not wholly satisfied with the schema
nomenclature, and his alternative suggestions for terminology—active developing
patterns and organized setting—reveal that he emphasized the plastic nature of
schemata in applying Head's concept to memory. Yet Bartlett did not simply
apply Head's concept to a new domain; rather, he extended and transformed it in

the process.
Bartlett's use of the term attitude is crucial to understanding his reworking of
the schema concept (Larsen & Berntsen, 2000). Bartlett noted that the first thing
to emerge in any act of remembering is often an attitude that is "largely a matter
of feeling or affect" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 207). It is important to note that this
"feeling or affect" is a wider concept than emotion and that it is a significant part
of Bartlett's phenomenology of memory. For Bartlett, recall was a construction
made on the basis of this attitude. Zangwill (1972) traced Bartlett's use of the
concept of attitude to Betz's Einstellung, usually translated as "mental posture" or
"set." In his extensive review of the pre- 1940s work on emotions and memory the
psychoanalyst Rapaport located Bartlett's use of the concept of attitude in the

context of German introspectionist psychology and equated it with "selective
force" (Rapaport, 1942). Larsen and Berntsen (2000) drew attention to the fact
that the notion of attitude has led a quiet life in comparison to the substantial
influence of the concept of schema. They argued that this relative neglect is
attributable to the mentalistic nature of attitude. As Ross (1991) noted in his
history of the study of autobiographical memory, when Bartlett was writing
Remembering much of the earlier subjective approach lingered, but this aspect of
Bartlett's thinking about memory has been "tactfully ignored" (Ross, 1991, p. 21).
Discomfort with this subjective aspect of Bartlett's work contributed to Zang-
will's (1972) dismissal of the significance of the schema concept. In their
thorough series of theoretical reviews of Head, Bartlett, and Welters's use of
schemata, Oldfield and Zangwill (1942, 1943a, 1943b, 1943c) made it clear that
they wished to discard some of the more mentalistic and subjective aspects of
Bartlett's thinking, such as his equation of consciousness with "turning around on
one's own schemata." In a later, retrospective article Zangwill (1972) was more
explicit about his despair about the coherence and fruitfulness of Bartlett's chief
theoretical concept.
Northway (1940a) also emphasized the multiple ways that Bartlett used the
term schema. She attributed the variation in Bartlett's application of the term to
his attempt to integrate Ward's psychology-with Head's physiology and Rivers's
anthropology. Northway wished instead to redefine schema to bring it in line with
the active view of memory:
To Lotze and all idealistic psychologists the memory is a crucial instance; there is
no faculty of memory, no cerebral organ, no "storehouse of ideas"; only the living
continuity of the soul and-its power of reproducing its previous activities... .
Memory does not keep any picture; what it really retains is a kind of schema, a
plan of action. (Brett, 1921, cited in Northway, 1940a, p. 320)
Northway's definition of schema was "what the subject makes from the given
material." She explored this specific use of the term through experimental work
on children's learning and creation of stories and poetry and argued for a
progressive view of education on the basis of a more constructive and creative
view of memory (Northway, 1940b).
Bartlett's broad and multifarious use of the term schema forced all later
investigators of the concept to first narrow their application of the term. Oldfield
(1954) provided another illustration of the need to narrow the purview of schema
and related it to a then-current theoretical viewpoint when he recast the concept
354 JOHNSTON
in terms of information theory. The same trend is evident in Mandler and

Johnson's second-wave study of The War of the Ghosts. Mandler and Johnson
(1977) re-examined the structure of Bartlett's most frequently used folk tale in the
context of story grammars to produce a new rendering of Bartlett's work that
emphasized the cognitive aspects of schemata related to narrative structure at the
expense of other aspects of Bartlett's concept, such as the importance of individ-
uals' attitudes and interests. Their point of departure was the somewhat incom-
prehensible nature of The War of the Ghosts folk tale.
A Bizarre and Disjointed Tale: Mandler and Johnson (1977)

The War of the Ghosts bears about as much resemblance to normal prose as
nonsense syllables do to words. In fact, much of Bartlett's analysis of recall of this
passage is about the mental gymnastics his English college students had to use in
comprehending and remembering such a bizarre and disjointed tale. (Roediger,
1997, p. 492)
Much of the subsequent criticism of Bartlett' s work focuses around this point:
that the War of the Ghosts story is exceptional. Mandler and Johnson (1977)
provided a particularly clear example of the transformation of Bartlett's work
within an information-processing framework. They performed a story grammar
analysis of Bartlett's version of The War of the Ghosts. As Mandler and Johnson
themselves acknowledged, their application of the schema concept in this context
was much more specific and narrow than Bartlett's. They redefined Bartlett's
schema as a story schema, by which they meant "an idealized internal represen-
tation of the parts of a typical story and the relationship among these parts" (p.
Ill) and "a set of expectations about the internal structure of stories which serves
to facilitate both encoding and retrieval" (p. 112). In contrast, Bartlett used
schema to cover a wide range of ways that past and present experiences interact:
In terms of The War of the Ghosts story these included the expectations that his
participants brought to bear about the motivations and emotions of the characters
in the story, their semantic knowledge about hunting and battles, cultural con-
ventions regarding tribal warfare and supernatural themes in stories, the partici-
pants' attitudes toward the material, and the effects of the outside interests and
expertise they brought to bear on their reading of the story. Bartlett did not
concentrate on his research participants' expectations about story structure; the
only place he mentioned this aspect of schemata was in discussing the serial
reproduction of cumulative stories that were less vulnerable to changes in the
general series of incidents (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 138).
By concentrating on the grammar of the story Mandler and Johnson (1977)
focused on structural inadequacies of the narrative rather than specific content or
individual participants' responses to that content. Mandler and Johnson identified
several points where The War of the Ghosts violated the rules of the grammar they
had developed for well-formed folk tales. They found that "the predominant
characteristic of Bartlett's version of the story is the presence of temporal
relations where causal ones are expected" (p. 138). Their analysis gives a concise
account of the bizarre and disjointed nature of the story. They reanalyzed the six
initial reproductions provided by Bartlett (1932/1995) and found that five of the
six propositions that almost no one recalled are next to a violation in the story
grammar and that distortions in content also occurred most frequently at these
points. There are, however, five other points in the story that Mandler and Johnson
tagged for story grammar violations that were not subsequently discussed in terms
of their consequences for Bartlett's participants' reproductions.
This exclusive focus on the structural considerations led to a neglect of many
of the factors Bartlett deemed most important: individual special interests, affect
and temperament, and social determination of recall. Mandler and Johnson's
(1977) concept of a story schema could be coded and form the basis of a "story
reproduction" program. Mandler and Johnson argued that Bartlett's participants
were forced to forget or invent at predetermined points in the story because of its
faulty structure. This analysis meshed with the information-processing paradigm
dominant in cognitive psychology at the time of Mandler and Johnson's publi-

cation, but it left by the wayside the enormous individual variation in story
reproductions that so impressed Bartlett. Mandler and Johnson's rendition of
Bartlett's work is incomplete; by substituting part of Bartlett's meaning of schema
for the whole they transformed the concept to bring it in line with their theoretical
perspective.
The issue of programming representations of knowledge, such as schemata,
was actively pursued in the cognitive science and artificial-intelligence (AI)
communities in the 1970s (Bransford, 1979). Not all researchers referred to them
as schemata; the terms frames and scripts were used for the same purposes: to
precisely specify knowledge of the world that could be used to comprehend new
information. A compelling point that these studies quickly unearthed was the
extreme difficulty of capturing the extent of human knowledge, even when quite
simple concepts or restricted situations were used. Bransford (1979) gave the
example of the synonyms catch and apprehend: One can say "The policeman
apprehended the thief," but not "The policeman apprehended the ball." In the case
of a computer program everything has to be specified, and that turns out to be a
Sisyphean task. The strategy adopted during this period of interest in Bartlett's
concept of schema was to tightly specify the domain of application, working with
schemata or scripts for commonly occurring events, such as the restaurant script.
These scripts were then used to comprehend inputs in the form of stories (Schank,
1977). The striking thing about the computef rewrites of simple restaurant tales is
their banality: They contain none of the imaginative rationalizing power that
Bartlett noted in his participants' reproductions. Bartlett's participants altered The
War of the Ghosts by adding statements about the characters' thoughts, motiva-
tions, intentions, and feelings, whereas the computer rewrites added many more
descriptive behavioral steps without enriching the theory of mind content of the
stories. Reviewing the AI script work7 of this second-wave period reinforces the
point that applying the schema notion is a selective process that results in
transformation of Bartlett's concept.
The term schema applied to memory still has currency within cognitive,
social, and developmental psychology, so the process of transformation continues.
7
As a reviewer pointed out, this is an outdated view of the AI field. In the 20 years since the
script work I describe new AI approaches have emerged; see, for example, Clark's (1997) critique
of the encyclopedic machine knowledge project, CYC, in his recent text Being There. My point here
is that the 1970s information-processing-AI instantiation of Bartlett's concept of schema was a
theoretically driven reconstruction of the concept that significantly transformed its meaning by
restricting it to considerations of story structure.
356 JOHNSTON
Studies of expertise in the Newell and Simon tradition emphasize the develop-
ment of memory skills involving chunking, or the building of schemata (Chase &
Simon, 1973; Gobet & Simon, 1998). Research on the development of children's
memory has used a version of the concept of schema as a general knowledge base
(Nelson, 1993). The pattern-detecting aspect of schema has been expanded in
parallel-distributed processing models of memory (McClelland, 1995). The flex-
ibility of the term schema has led to redefinitions of Bartlett's concept that depart
quite radically from his original intent.
Third Wave
The third marked wave of interest in Bartlett's work is motivated by the

wide-ranging and unified view of mental life afforded by his theories; few
influential experimental psychologists maintained the serious interest in the social
formation of cognition evinced by Bartlett. Bartlett was much concerned with
social influences on personal recall. Remembering is subtitled A Study in Exper-
imental and Social Psychology, and the second part of the book is entitled Social
Psychology. The lack of attention paid to the second section of the book in the first
and second waves of Bartlett reproduction is what led Edwards and Middleton
(1987) to suggest that it often seems as if researchers are referencing two different
books, "one on cognitive aspects of individual recall, and another on social factors
influencing recall" (p. 78). The third wave of Bartlett revival pays much closer
attention to his social psychology.
Giving Up the Social Ghost

It is ironic that the beginnings of the renewed focus on social aspects of
Bartlett's work were sparked by an outright denunciation of the capabilities of
psychologists to seriously attend to the social nature of humans. In her biography
of Evans-Pritchard, anthropologist Mary Douglas flatly stated: "The author of the
best book on remembering forgot his own first convictions. He became absorbed
into the institutional framework of Cambridge University psychology and re-
stricted by the conditions of the experimental laboratory" (Douglas, 1980, p. 19).
In her later book How Institutions Think she was even more declarative and
emphatically antipsychological:
According to the thought style of his day, it was improbable that institutional
constraints would have mtfch influence on moderns, so it would not be worth
searching for them... . His career is a self-referencing instance of the claim that
psychologists are institutionally incapable of remembering that humans are social
beings. As soon as they know it, they forget it. (Douglas, 1987, p. 81)
Douglas's rendition of Bartlett's view is a classic instance of omission and
condensation transforming the meaning of the whole that typifies the treatment of
Bartlett's work. According to Douglas, Bartlett thought that socially supported
memory led to a mechanical style of recall (Douglas, 1980). Although Bartlett did,
indeed, contrast the automatic character of a Swazi herdsman's recall of cattle
bought a year earlier with the effortful, constructive recall of a map by a geologist
and mining expert a year after prospecting a site, he was not slavishly equating
social support with mechanical recall. He went on to state:
Now of course it would be absurd to maintain that the socially determined recall
is always predominantly of the first, recitative type; while remembering which is
directed by individual interests is predominantly of the second, the constructive
type. Indeed I shall later urge that social determination of recall often affords just
the basis for that constructiveness which has been found already to characterize
many instances of recall. (Bartlett, 1932/1995, pp. 251-252)
These are not the words of a psychologist who has forgotten that humans are
social beings. Furthermore, in the results of his experimental work, which Doug-
las deemed incapable of capturing institutional effects, Bartlett discerned clear
social influences on remembering:
A glance back over the chapter on Repeated Reproduction will give us numerous
cases. The "old mother at home" and the "filial piety" were both direct expressions
of family group influences. The occasion and directness of rationalization were
alike found to be largely given by social conditions. Much outstanding detail owed
its prominence to social influences. (Bartlett, 1932/1995, pp. 252-253)
When one further considers that one of Bartlett's next books was on political
propaganda, a clear instance of his interest in social factors, it becomes clear that
Douglas's anthropological focus led her to underestimate the strong social thread
in Bartlett's work.
Costall, a psychologist noted for his anticognitivist stance, produced two
scholarly articles on the development of Bartlett's thought (Costall, 1991, 1992).
He concurred with Douglas that Bartlett had abandoned his early radically social
conception of cognition for an individualistic and mechanical view inspired by the
cybernetic approach and his World War n-driven work on human-machine
interfaces. Although Bartlett's extensive work in applied psychology was con-
cerned with the impact of human perception and cognition on the use of machines,
he did not view humans as machinelike. In his obituary of his former student,
Kenneth Craik,8 Bartlett made this clear:
He seemed to be trying to see [complex calculating machines] as evidence that in
so far as they are successful, they show how the mind works, not in inventing the
machines and using them, but in actually solving the problems. If therefore the
flexibility of such machines could be so enormously increased that they could deal
with as many and as varied situations as the mind and body can master, this would
prove that they work just as the mind and body do, and further, the principles
explaining their operation would be exactly those principles which are used in the
current explanation of the operations of any system called mechanical. Both these
inferences are dubious. (Bartlett, 1946, p. 114)
Other modern re-examiners of Bartlett's work have taken the opposite tack of
forefronting and stressing the importance of Bartlett's characterization of memory
as socially and culturally influenced. For example, Edwards and Middleton (1987)
explicitly recast Bartlett's work to illustrate its compatibility with their focus on
discourse analysis.
8
Craik was a promising young scientist who had already written an important cognitive text,
The Nature of Explanation (Craik, 1943), before his fatal bicycle accident. He was appointed head
of the new Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, a position that Bartlett took over and held for
6 years.
358 JOHNSTON
Talking With the Subject: Edwards and Middleton (1987)

Edwards and Middleton (1987) bemoaned the one-sided representation of
Bartlett as a major forerunner of the information-processing approach to memory
and developed the argument that a previously hidden thread in Bartlett's work is
the key to restoring it to its proper place as the foundation of a "broader, culturally
contextualized and functional approach to the study of everyday remembering" (p.
77). Given Edwards and Middleton's commitment to the methodology of dis-
course analysis, it is natural that they perceived the previously ignored Bartlettian
emphasis on conversational discourse. Although Edwards and Middleton did
emphasize an aspect of Bartlett's writings that accords best with their own
theoretical standpoint, their rendering of Bartlett is not as restrictive as some

previous accounts, because they pointed to other neglected aspects of Bartlett's
work: the role of "feeling" and "attitude" in remembering and the crossmodal
nature of "symbolic remembering."
As Edwards and Middleton (1987) illustrated (pp. 85-87), Bartlett's text is
replete with accounts of conversations with his research participants. From
reading Bartlett's texts, including his many accounts of the development of the
Cambridge school of psychology, and his students' published appreciations, I get
the impression that Bartlett was a man who loved to talk about psychology with
his students, his friends, and his research participants (I suspect these were widely
overlapping categories). His genuine interest in what his participants had to say
about their approach to his tasks is communicated throughout his discussions of
experimental results. In his autobiography, which is really a personal synopsis of
his conception of psychology, Bartlett made his position on first-person accounts
clear: "Very often the most valuable information can be given in terms possible
only to the person himself who responds" (Bartlett, 1936, p. 42). This position
was very much against the grain of the then-current behaviorist psychology with
its focus on the lawfulness of participants' responses rather than their idiosyn-
crasies and differences.
Although the subjective reports of research participants were taken seriously,
and plenty of discourse was reported, Bartlett did not analyze the pragmatics of
the experimental situation in the manner characteristic of discursive psycholo-
gists. For example, in their reanalysis of Neisser's John Dean case study, Edwards
and Potter (1992) focused on the pragmatic function of the statements Dean made
about his own memory. In contrast, Bartlett took his participants' statements
about their memory at face value and never probed their communicative intent. In
fact, his seeming unawareness of the pragmatics of the situation when he tested
the only non-British participant in his repeated-reproduction experiments, an
Indian he described as "impressionable, imaginative, and, using the word in its
ordinary conventional sense, nervous to a high degree" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, pp.
75-76), is jarring from a contemporary viewpoint. Bartlett seemed unaware of the
role that his own presence and stature might have in increasing the nervousness
of the colonized subject.
Edwards and Middleton (1987) documented the prevalence and importance of
conversational exchange in Bartlett's theories of remembering, but the theoretical
significance they attached to this finding diverged radically from Bartlett's view-
point. In their self-aware reinvention of Bartlett, Edwards and Middleton devel-
oped a theme that becomes familiar when examining recent writings about
Bartlett's Remembering: the need to augment Bartlett's theorizing with other

conceptions of the social nature of recall. Many recent articles have suggested the
fusion of Bartlett's views with those of other theorists, such as Bakhtin (Beals,
1998), Wittgenstein (Shotter, 1990), Moscovici (Saito, 1996), and Edelman
(Saito, 1996).
Augmenting Bartlett's Conception of the Social

Beals (1998) argued that Bartlett's conception of the social is inadequate and
that a marriage with the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin's perspective would
remedy this deficiency. Bakhtin shared Vygotsky's emphasis on the social for-
mation of mind through language (Vygotsky, 1962). Nowhere in Bartlett's writing

is there any emphasis on the learning of language as the means whereby the social
constitutes individual cognition. The concepts of internalization and inner speech,
so crucial to Vygotsky and Bakhtin's theorizing, are absent from Bartlett's
writings. Perhaps this lack of emphasis on the social nature of language was
derived from the fact that Bartlett's chief analogy for schemata was bodily in
nature rather than verbal. In light of the wealth of recent work on the development
of "socially accessible memory" (Pillemer, 1998; Pillemer & White, 1989), the
absence of this theme from Bartlett's theorizing is significant. Attention to the
work of Vygotsky more naturally leads to the current emphasis on the importance
of the extent and form of memory talk in the construction of personal event
memory.
Wittgenstein was another contemporary of Bartlett's who paid serious atten-
tion to the interrelations of the mental, linguistic, and social (Wittgenstein, 1953).
Although Bartlett and Wittgenstein were both luminaries in Cambridge, England,
between the wars, I can find no reference to any mutual awareness. Consequently,
Wittgenstein's penetrating account of the social nature of language and its role in
the formation of mentality did not inform Bartlett's work, yet there are some
striking congruencies in their approaches. A Wittgensteinian analysis of remem-
bering has the same point of departure as Bartlett took in Remembering: a
dismantling of the notion that memories 9onsist of faint traces or images of
isolated past events (Malcolm, 1977; Shotter, 1987,1990). Bartlett's focus on the
everyday uses of memory and the way that enduring individual interests generate
memory expertise fits well with Wittgenstein's central notion of forms of life.
Although Bartlett's conception of the social nature of remembering was not fully
developed along the lines suggested by Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin, it
was a strong and integral aspect of his approach.
False Memories of Bartlett

At least some of the renewed interest in Bartlett's work can be attributed to
the current furor over false memories. Although Bartlett's text is not referenced
in any of the trade publications that directly address questions of false memories
and sexual abuse, written mainly by clinicians and journalists, the publications
stemming from the experimental psychology of memory field are full of refer-
ences to Bartlett as the originator of the constructive view of memory (Conway,
1997; Schacter et al., 1995). Bartlett's characterization of memory does provide
a natural and compelling explanation of memory illusions, something I can
illustrate through a personal example.
360 JOHNSTON
I developed a flagrantly false memory in connection with my studies of

Bartlett's work. I was searching for an encyclopedia entry Bartlett wrote on the
topic of memory, which Costall (1991) cited as evidence of Bartlett's later turn
toward an information-processing view of memory. It was not available in either
of the editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) owned by my college library, so
I asked my parents to send me a copy of the article that I remembered reading in
my family's EB. I have a clear memory of finding the article in my family's
encyclopedia and being delighted that it was written by Bartlett; I remember
exactly where I was sitting, and I have a vivid image of my surroundings. After
causing much familial confusion, I realized that I had fabricated this pleasing
memory. My family owns the 1976 edition, by which time Zangwill's (1972)
article, which contains no mention of Remembering, had replaced Bartlett's.

My image of finding and reading Bartlett's article at home is still clear and
specific, but it could not have occurred. In Bartlett's words, "the appearance of a
visual image is followed by an increase in confidence entirely out of proportion
to any objective accuracy that it thereby secured" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 60). The
image is not based on nothing: I sat in that living room, in that very chair, reading
the encyclopedia many times. I had looked at the entry under "Memory" in the
past, but my current fascination with Bartlett led me to unwittingly transfer my
independent knowledge that Bartlett wrote an EB article on memory in my
construction of a memory of an event that never occurred. In constructing this
memory I wove together pieces from various schemata to make a coherent whole
that formed a convincing autobiographical memory.
To construct this memory I had to omit several other pieces of knowledge:
that Zangwill had written the article, that there was nothing about Remembering
in the article, and that the timing was not correct, and I even had to override an
uneasiness about the slight familiarity of ZangwilTs (1972) article when I looked
at it in my college library, although that probably had more to do with the layout
and feel of the pages than the content.
My argument in this article is that the various constructions of Bartlett's views
on memory share this potentially distorting quality: The selection of outstanding
detail in line with the scholars' interests leads inevitably to the omission of other
aspects of Bartlett's eclectic work with its wide theoretical net. Because of the
interconnected nature of the many threads of Bartlett's position, these omissions
will lead to transformations in the view of remembering expounded. Bartlett
recognized that omissions often form the basis for transformations: "In a story
series of this type, any omission from an individual version is liable to become
significant and to account for a succession of connected changes in subsequent
versions" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 125).
One clear omission in light of the recruitment of Bartlett's views within the
false memory literature is his concomitant emphasis on stereotypy. Although
transformations and importations occur, there is also a strong tendency for
memories to become quickly fixed, especially with frequent reproductions. Kay
(1955) demonstrated this most compellingly in his reworking of Bartlett's
repeated-reproduction experiments. He modified Bartlett's technique by ending
each session with a rereading of the original passage. It is remarkable that he
found that successive versions bore a much greater resemblance to their imme-
diate predecessors than to the original passage. Despite their re-exposure to the
original passage, his research participants were "repeating the same correct items,
making the same errors, and omitting the same items one week after another"
(Kay, 1955, p. 89). As Kay succinctly expressed his major finding: "They could
be consistent with themselves, but not with the original" (Kay, 1955, p. 92).
One of the folk psychological beliefs about memory, which is instituted in
court cross-examination procedures, is that if someone is giving a true account
then he or she will give consistent versions of his or her story on different
occasions and that inconsistencies unmask lying and falsehood. In fact, Bartlett's
work undermines this view of memory. The concept of stereotypy means that
once a compelling detail has entered someone's narrative, it is very likely to
remain, especially if the story is told frequently. Furthermore, Bartlett suggested
that it is the imported or false portions of the story about which the teller may be
most confident, particularly if they play a significant role in making the narrative
coherent or generate a compelling mental image.
Reproductions Yet to Come

Although recent revisitors of Bartlett's work have been more explicit about
their reconstructive purpose than the many earlier reinventors of the Bartlettian
tradition, the tendency to omit, and thereby alter the shape of Bartlett's legacy,
continues. If Bartlett is right about the nature of human cognition, it could not be
otherwise. One important thread that has not been stressed in recent use of
Bartlett's work is his intense focus on the role of individual interests in motivating
remembering.9 Another radical aspect of Bartlett's work is his conception of the
role of mental imagery. Bartlett successfully dismantled the idea that memories
were like faint traces or images: literal, if faded, reproductions of single past
events or circumstances. Instead, he considered images as the means of selecting
from the mass of past experiences:
In general, images are a device for picking bits out of schemes, for increasing the
chance of variability in the reconstruction of past stimuli and situations, for
surmounting the chronology of presentations. By the aid of the image, and
particularly of the visual image... a man can take out of its setting something that
happened a year ago, reinstate it with much if not all of its individuality unim-
paired, combine it with something that happened yesterday, and use them both to
help him to solve a problem with which he is confronted to-day. (Bartlett,
1932/1995, p. 219)
This view of memory as the imaginative combination of many past experi-
ences brought to consciousness., by the present needs and purposes of the indi-
vidual is compatible with modern conceptions of memory processes (e.g.,
Schacter, 1996) and draws attention back to the prominent role of imagery in the
experience of remembering.
In closing his affectionate biographical memoir of Bartlett, Donald Broadbent
(1970) stated that10 "I myself feel that some of Bartlett's insights have still not had
their full impact, and that they will come into their own in the next generation"
9
Saito (1996) touched on this: "His approach involves, amongst others, placing affect and
conation (e.g. values, interests) at the root of cognition" (p. 404).
10
Broadbent was one of Bartlett's most famous students. He directed the Applied Psychology
Unit in Cambridge, England, from 1958 to 1974 and wrote a classic text for the information-
processing approach, Perception and Communication (Broadbent, 1958).
362 JOHNSTON
(p. 8). Broadbent's statement was prophetic: Interest in hitherto-neglected aspects

of Bartlett's work has been lively in recent years. One of the early reviewers of
Remembering speculated that
the book will find a place upon the shelves of those who study remembering, but
it will not be in the special section reserved for those investigators whose writings
have become landmarks in the advance towards the comprehension of this impor-
tant problem (Jenkins, 1935, p. 715)
The fate of Bartlett's book within different eras—what historians refer to as
itsfortuna—has proven to be quite different. The variety of ways that Bartlett's
work has been used within different periods provides a good means of charac-
terizing theoretical shifts in psychological thinking. It is fitting that the reproduc-

tion of Bartlett's own work within the psychological literature confirms his thesis
about the constructive nature of human remembering and thinking.
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(Appendix follows)
366 JOHNSTON
Appendix
The War of the Ghosts
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals
and while they were there it became foggy and calm. They heard war cries and
they thought, "Maybe this is a war party." They escaped to the shore and hid
behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw
one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:
"What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river
to make war on the people."
One of the young men said: "I have no arrows."

"Arrows are in the canoe," they said.

"I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have
gone. But you," he said, turning to the other, "may go with them."
So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.
And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama.
The people came down to the water, and they began to fight, and many were
killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say, "Quick, let us
go home; that Indian has been hit."
Now he thought, "Oh, they are ghosts." He did not feel sick, but they said he
had been shot.
So the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young man went ashore to his
house and made a fire. And he told everybody and said, "Behold, I accompanied
the ghosts, and we went to a fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of
those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit and I did not feel sick."
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down.
Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people
jumped up and cried.
He was dead. (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 65)
Received August 6, 1999
Revision received January 16, 2001
Accepted March 8, 2001 •
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THE REPEATED REPRODUCTION OF

There is a striking parallel between the treatment of F. C. Bartlett's theories of

reproductive memory as interest driven and constructive. Three periods of intensi-

fied interest in Bartlett's classic book Remembering (1932/1995) can be identified.

necessitates another revisiting of Bartlett to provide my version of his findings.

Bartlett's Findings in Historical Context

repeated reproduction results with this point: "Accuracy of reproduction, in a

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmen-

Cambridge neurologist Henry Head (1861-1940) as the inspiration for this

theoretical innovation (Bartlett, 1932/1995, pp. 198-200). Although Bartlett

The effect of this clinical work on Bartlett's conception of memory is not

Stephenson's (1967) article documenting a failure to replicate Bartlett's serial

After the publication of Remembering several studies, most of them experi-

Affective Determination: Paul (1959)

on individual participants' memories and the particulars of each participant's

There clearly is some dissent on this issue.5 As one of the teachers of

failure to replicate, but their experiments differed from Bartlett's in important

"guessed" and "romanced." As Carruthers (1990) detailed in her study of memory

in medieval culture, morality and memory have long been linked:

development of memory expertise.

Although the history of Bartlett's emphasis on the active organizational role

apply Head's concept to a new domain; rather, he extended and transformed it in

psychoanalyst Rapaport located Bartlett's use of the concept of attitude in the

in terms of information theory. The same trend is evident in Mandler and

A Bizarre and Disjointed Tale: Mandler and Johnson (1977)

dominant in cognitive psychology at the time of Mandler and Johnson's publi-

The third marked wave of interest in Bartlett's work is motivated by the

Giving Up the Social Ghost

Talking With the Subject: Edwards and Middleton (1987)

theoretical standpoint, their rendering of Bartlett is not as restrictive as some

Bartlett's Remembering: the need to augment Bartlett's theorizing with other

Augmenting Bartlett's Conception of the Social

mation of mind through language (Vygotsky, 1962). Nowhere in Bartlett's writing

False Memories of Bartlett

I developed a flagrantly false memory in connection with my studies of

article, which contains no mention of Remembering, had replaced Bartlett's.

Reproductions Yet to Come

(p. 8). Broadbent's statement was prophetic: Interest in hitherto-neglected aspects

terizing theoretical shifts in psychological thinking. It is fitting that the reproduc-

Broadbent, D. E. (1970). Frederic Charles Bartlett 1886-1969. Biographical Memoirs of

Johnson, R. E. (1962). The retention of qualitative changes in learning. Journal of Verbal

and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 111-151.

Roediger, H. L. IE (1996). Memory illusions. Journal of Memory and Language, 35,

Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for memory. New York: Basic Books.

One of the young men said: "I have no arrows."

"Arrows are in the canoe," they said.

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