1886–1969 · psychologist, Cambridge

rederic Charles Bartlett directed the Cambridge psychological laboratory from 1922 and became the university's first professor of experimental psychology in 1931. He was knighted in 1948, largely for wartime work on pilots, fatigue and skill.

what he did

His book Remembering (Bartlett, 1932) reported years of studies in which people recalled stories and pictures repeatedly, or passed them from person to person. He found recall shortened, rationalised and drifted toward the familiar, and he explained it with the schema: memory not as a store of traces but as a reconstruction shaped by attitudes and past experience [paraphrase, not a quotation]. See the archive page on Remembering.

what is argued about

His methods were informal, and the size of his effects has been disputed (Gauld & Stephenson, 1967); replications find the distortions, but smaller (Bergman & Roediger, 1999). Ost & Costall (2002) argue that textbooks have misremembered him, turning a social, anti-mechanistic thinker into the founder of a tidy cognitive theory [paraphrase, not a quotation].

why he is here

Bartlett is the ancestor of the modern view that remembering is constructive, which runs through false memory research and into the question of what a language model is doing when it produces a plausible but wrong past: see hallucination.

Primary works and sources

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. Bergman & Roediger (1999). Can Bartlett’s repeated reproduction experiments be replicated?. Memory & Cognition. doi:10.3758/bf03201224
4. Ost & Costall (2002). Misremembering Bartlett: A study in serial reproduction. British Journal of Psychology. doi:10.1348/000712602162562

see also

	archive: Remembering — the book
	Hermann Ebbinghaus — the method he argued against
	timeline: memory