Frederic Charles Bartlett

Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (born October 20, 1886 in Stow-on-the-Wold (Great Britain), † September 30, 1969 in Cambridge ) was a British psychologist and professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge University from 1931 until his retirement in 1951. With Kenneth Craik he was responsible for the founding of the Medical Research Council 's A pplied P sychology Research U nit (APU) in Cambridge in 1944, of which he became director after Craik's untimely death in 1945. He was one of the pioneers in the field of cognitive psychology .

In 1932 he became a member of the Royal Society (a rare honor for a psychologist) and in 1948 he was for his services in the field of applied psychology in the Royal Air Force to Knight Bachelor beaten. In 1945 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society , 1947 to the National Academy of Sciences and 1958 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Series of images after F. Bartlett

The British Society for Ergonomics donated the Bartlett Medal in his honor and the Society for Experimental Psychology publishes an annual Bartlett Lecture.

Example from Bartlett's cognitive psychology

In his book Remembering (1932) he laid the foundations for schema research. The game Chinese Whispers , in which a person a story is whispered in his ear, whereupon this the next continue whispering the content has brought Bartlett to the idea of the influence of the existing prior knowledge on the perception to examine new information and storage.

The sketch of a Polynesian mask drawing was shown to a test person as a "portrait of a man". The test person had to trace them from memory a little later (Fig. 52).

Each drawing was presented to a different person with the same task . Figure 54 shows the transformation to the Asian scheme, Figure 55 to the European scheme of a face.

The results of his research led him to see memory as a kind of collection of schemes that influence perception and thus also memory.

The adjacent pictures 51 to 55 show his findings based on an investigation by the French researcher Philippe .

literature

The following dates are not necessarily those of the original publications:

• Remembering (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1932)
• Thinking (Basic Books, New York, 1958)
• The Problem of Noise (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1934)
• Exercises in Logic (Clive, London, 1922)
• The Mind at Work and Play (Allen and Unwin, London, 1951)
• Psychology and the Soldier (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1927)
• Political Propaganda (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1940)
• Psychology and Primitive Culture (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1923)
• Religion As Experience, Belief, Action (Cumberledge, London, 1950)

Web links

• Literature by and about Frederic Charles Bartlett in the catalog of the German National Library
• Remembering ( Memento from February 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive )