rederic Bartlett, at Cambridge, asked students to read a Native American folk tale, "The War of the Ghosts", and to write it down from memory, again and again, over weeks and sometimes years. The versions got shorter, more conventional and more English. From this he built a theory of memory as reconstruction.

the document

Bartlett, Remembering. We could not verify a free, stable copy; scans online are lending-only. The book is widely held in libraries.

what it says

Two methods: repeated reproduction, in which one person recalls the same material many times, and serial reproduction, in which each person's recall becomes the next person's material, like the game of telephone. In both, Bartlett reported omissions, rationalisation of puzzling details, and transformation toward the familiar. He explained them with the schema, an active organisation of past experience, and described remembering as an "effort after meaning": an imaginative reconstruction built from an attitude toward a mass of past experience and a little outstanding detail [paraphrase, not a quotation]. See Bartlett.

what's contested

Did the distortions replicate? Gauld & Stephenson (1967) found that many "errors" in Bartlett-style recall were conscious guesses or embellishments that participants could identify when asked, and that instructions stressing accuracy reduced them. Wheeler & Roediger (1992) reconciled Bartlett with the opposite finding of improved recall over repeated tests, and Bergman & Roediger (1999) replicated the distortions in repeated reproduction of the same story over a long delay [paraphrase, not a quotation]. The effect is real, but smaller and more instruction-dependent than the textbook version.

Misremembering Bartlett. Ost & Costall (2002) argue that the textbook account itself is a serial reproduction: Bartlett's cautious, social and anti-mechanistic view was retold as a simple cognitive theory of schema-driven distortion, losing the parts that did not fit [paraphrase, not a quotation].

methodological critiques

By later standards the studies were informal: few participants, varying intervals, unstandardised instructions, and results presented as selected examples rather than counts. Bartlett defended this, preferring naturalistic material to Ebbinghaus's nonsense syllables; critics answered that without counts the size of the effect is unknowable. That tension, ecological validity against control, runs through all later memory research.

later reception

Schema theory returned with cognitive psychology: people recalled objects that fit an office but were not there (Brewer & Treyens, 1981). The reconstruction view underlies the misinformation studies of Loftus & Palmer (1974), the false-recall lists of Roediger & McDermott (1995), and Schacter's account of memory's "sins". Schacter & Addis (2007) turned it around: a memory that reconstructs is also a memory that can imagine the future. For language models that generate a plausible past, see hallucination.

References

1. Bartlett (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (No free stable copy that we could verify; the scanned copies we found are lending-only.)
2. Gauld & Stephenson (1967). Some experiments relating to Bartlett's theory of remembering. British Journal of Psychology. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1967.tb01054.x
3. Wheeler & Roediger (1992). Disparate Effects of Repeated Testing: Reconciling Ballard's (1913) and Bartlett's (1932) Results. Psychological Science. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00036.x
4. Bergman & Roediger (1999). Can Bartlett’s repeated reproduction experiments be replicated?. Memory & Cognition. doi:10.3758/bf03201224
5. Ost & Costall (2002). Misremembering Bartlett: A study in serial reproduction. British Journal of Psychology. doi:10.1348/000712602162562
6. Brewer & Treyens (1981). Role of schemata in memory for places. Cognitive Psychology. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(81)90008-6
7. Loftus & Palmer (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3
8. Roediger & McDermott (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803
9. Schacter (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.54.3.182
10. Schacter & Addis (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.2087

see also