[I]f 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)
Bartlett was a Cambridge psychologist through and through. He spent his entire
academic career (1909-1969) in Cambridge, England and held the first Chair in
Psychology there (only the third in Britain). He was profoundly influenced by
four men: James Ward (1843-1925), Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at
Cambridge; W.H.R.
Rivers (1864-1922), the physician, psychologist and anthropologist who held
the first Cambridge University lectureship in Experimental Psychology; C.S.
Myers (1873-1946), the physician and industrial psychologist who founded
the Cambridge psychological laboratory; and Henry
Head (1861-1940), a Cambridge neurologist.
Bartlett had a high regard for intellectual friendship, fellowship, and community.
His eclectic and innovative views of the subject matter of psychology were drawn
from these influences. It's important to realize that this group was engaged
in the establishment of Psychology as a discipline; they were creating their
own field of study. They were all independent thinkers with liberal and progressive
views. Bartlett followed Rivers in wanting to move from Psychology to Anthropology;
this was an unrealized aim that played out through his interest in social psychology.
From the philosopher/psychologist Ward Bartlett acquired his enduring emphasis
on the active nature of human cognition and the overwhelming importance of the
subject's interests. Myers was Bartlett's mentor in Experimental Psychology
and inspired his interest in applied psychology. From his many conversations
with Henry Head, Bartlett formulated his key theoretical concept: the schema.
Bartlett was a late bloomer due to a prolonged bout of pleurisy that kept him
out of school; he attained a first class degree in Moral Sciences in 1914 at
the age of 28. Though his start was late, his rise was meteoric: in the same
year as his graduation and appointment as an Assistant in Experimental Psychology,
war broke out and all of his seniors in Cambridge left for war service. Bartlett
was ineligible for service due to a heart condition (he tried to enlist three
times), so he was appointed Temporary Director of the department. He went almost
immediately from undergraduate student status to head of Psychology at Cambridge,
and he never obtained a Ph.D. Although Rivers and Myers returned at the end
of WWI, both were profoundly changed by their
war work with shell shocked soldiers and had less time and patience for
departmental matters. Myers left Cambridge in 1922 to found the National Institute
of Industrial Psychology in London, and Rivers died suddenly in the spring of
1922, leaving Bartlett alone at the helm of Cambridge psychology.
Remembering (1932) is Bartlett's most important and influential book. The fact that it was reprinted as recently as 1995 is a testament to its lasting influence. In Chapter 1 Bartlett gives us information about what he is reacting against: he tells us that he will not follow the Ebbinghaus tradition of memory studies and that reliance on statistical techniques (as in the intelligence movement) can be overdone.
In Memory (1885) Ebbinghaus reported his classic studies on forgetting.
He composed lists of nonsense syllables (consonant-vowel-consonant combinations)
and measured how many spoken repetitions it took for him to achieve a perfect
reproduction from memory. He returned to the lists at different intervals and
measured the number of repetitions it took to relearn them to the perfect reproduction
criterion. The difference in repetitions of the list between time 1 and time
2 was called the 'savings' and taken as a measure of the retention of
the list. From a huge number of trials on himself Ebbinghaus derived
a "forgetting curve".
Ebbinghaus's methods are based on the view that memory consists of individual traces of events that are engraved on the mind:
"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. 52-3)
It was precisely this trace theory of memory that Bartlett was opposed to, he saw the past acting as an organized mass, rather than as individual records of events. Consequently, he broke with tradition and experimented in a much looser style on memory for more realistic materials.