Remembering

the long version

In 1932 Cambridge University Press published Remembering by psychologist Frederic Bartlett. The landmark book described fascinating studies of memory and presented the theory of schema that informs much of cognitive science and psychology today. In Bartlett's most famous experiment, subjects read a Native American story about ghosts and then retold the tale. Because their backgrounds were so different from the cultural context of the story, the subjects changed details that they could not understand. On the basis of observations like these, Bartlett developed his claim that memory is a process of reconstruction, and that this reconstruction is in important ways a social act. His ideas about the social psychology of memory and the cultural context of remembering were long neglected but are finding an interested and responsive audience today.