Frederic C. Bartlett (1932), Cambridge University Press, 317 pp. — DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511759185
Key takeaways
Filed, not read (no lawful full text was reachable; see the history note). From the publisher’s description of the 1995 reissue only: Bartlett’s studies of memory, the best known of which had subjects read and later retell a Native American story about ghosts, found that subjects changed the details they could not understand from their own cultural background. From this he argued that memory is a process of reconstruction, organised by schemata, and that the reconstruction is in important ways a social act.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 at the owner’s request, as one of the works in the reference list of the owner’s working manuscript (October 2026) that the record did not yet hold. See the curation entry of that day.
Kirby, Cornish & Smith (LIT-771, NOTE-596) name this book as the first use of the diffusion-chain method, and Griffiths & Kalish’s closing extrapolation of iterated learning to legends (LIT-769, NOTE-599) describes the case its serial-reproduction chapters studied; THEORY-155 names it as the case that claim would have to meet. A reading should check what Bartlett’s serial-reproduction chains converged to, and whether he described it as the reproducers’ own expectations taking over.