When1: 1923
When2: 1939
Who: Frederic Charles Bartlett [Bartlett, Frederic Charles]
What: psychologist
Where: Britain
works\ Psychology and Primitive Culture [1923]; Remembering [1932]; Study of Society [1939]
Detail: He lived 1886 to 1969 and helped found cognitive psychology. He used reaction times and image rotation to learn about representation properties. He studied memory using stories and pictures.
Organisms must understand current situation to know how to behave and so search for meaning in environment. Perceiving, recognition, imaging, and recall are for meaning. Thinking uses past experience to solve problems and choose from possible solutions. Thinking is skill, which improves with instruction and practice, by interpolation or extrapolation.
Memory is construction from all mental information representations and is easy to forget and distort.
Memory and recall have no basic units, because stimuli have multiple responses. Random words or nonsense syllables can have related meanings but do not have higher-level categories, making them poor memory test, because abstract higher-level categories are important for memory.
Structures organize motor events, integrate/relate/give meaning to objects and events, and interpret {schema, Bartlett}. Schemas are at every meaning level in semantic hierarchies. Schemas also underlie memory strength. Memory strength depends on object and event relation to constructed schema. Memory content is more meaningful if it matches schema. The schema can alter memory content to fit schema and improve understanding and meaning. People remember meaningful content better.
Stories, descriptions, and pictures have meaning. Confusing sentences in stories can test if recall is less and/or distorted, because they cannot be meaningful. People recall ambiguous, complex, unexpected, out-of-context, or illogical sentences relative to constructed schema more weakly and/or with more changes. Higher-order schemas isolate and connect sentences, which integrate with different strengths.
People remember sentences that evoke emotion more strongly, because they integrate more, not match cues more.
Perceptual codes have no hierarchy. Semantic codes have hierarchy and so last longer.
Memories weaken over time and people can forget them.
Social Sciences>Psychology>History>Memory
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Date Modified: 2022.0224