The 26th Bartlett Memorial Lecture From Truths of Bartlett to Illusions of Vision

This is an informal account of Sir Frederic Bartlett's department at the time I was a student and started research in the late 1940s and 1950s, developing some themes of his influence and how his ideas, with Craik's, have had a major effect on experimental psychology ever since. As one of the diminishing tribe of those who knew 'Sir Fred', it seems appropriate to make this quite a personal statement, representative of his influence on us, rather than a formal paper. His interests were very great, including not only memory, but thinking and social issues largely based on anthropology, as well as practical problems of selection for skill, and design of machines to be appropriate for humans. A 'subliminal' theme is errors of perception. It is this that will be developed here as, following his influence as my teacher, this has been the central interest of my work, which took off from the Cambridge Psychology Department of that time.     

Conversation and remembering: Bartlett revisited

Bartlett's book Remembering (1932) is frequently cited as a major forerunner of the information processing approach to memory and cognition. This approach has itself been criticized by one of its founders, Ulric Neisser (1982), for its narrowness and artificiality compared with the nature of remembering in natural contexts. A re-examination of Bartlett's work demonstrates that it offers little basis for an information processing approach, but rather that it offers the foundation of a much broader, culturally contextualized and functional approach to the study of everyday remembering. Three particular themes are discussed: the integration of social judgements and affective reactions with cognition, the role of conventional symbols in the coding and communication of experience, and the importance of conversational discourse. Bartlett's best-known studies, involving the method of serial reproduction, are shown to be microcosmic demonstrations of the process that he was most concerned with—that of conventionalization of symbols rather than of the workings of an individual's memory. It is argued, again beginning with Bartlett, that everyday remembering may be most fruitfully studied in terms of its personal and social functions, and particularly through its realization in discourse.     

The origin of factor scores: Spearman,Thomson and Bartlett

The indeterminacy of factor scores has been a perennial source of debate since the time of Spearman. The main purpose of this paper is to show that, in spite of his inadequate tools and concepts, Sir Godfrey Thomson's approach of 70 years ago was on the right lines. His thinking was constrained by the primitive state of his statistical understanding but it is illuminated by his substantial exchange of the correspondence with M. S. Bartlett in the 1930s, most of which has survived in the Godfrey Thomson archive at the University of Edinburgh. In order to justify our claim and clarify the issues, we have found it necessary to fill in some of the gaps in the original derivations of Spearman, Thomson and Bartlett and to express their work in terms which are intelligible today. The opportunity is taken to relate this earlier work to contemporary debates.     

Tenth Bartlett memorial lecture. Simula and torsrealism

The objectives of simulation are discussed on the basis of training in procedures or neuromuscular skills, and in relation to the amount of realism required. Motion sickness arising from inadequate co-ordination of visual and motion cues, is considered in relation to fixed and moving base simulators. In the perception of distance and size, the role of ocular convergence is discussed and an experimental approach suggested. The mentally stressful effects of increased responsibility, as robots enable the operator to extend his output, are discussed in relation to its covert symptomatology and to advanced flight concepts.     

The 30th Sir Frederick Bartlett lecture: Fact, artefact, and myth about blindsight

Blindsight is the ability, still controversial if a vote is taken, of subjects with clinically blind field defects to detect, localize, and discriminate visual stimuli of which the subjects say they are completely unaware—the original definition—or of which they might be aware but not in the sense of experiencing a visual percept. These two conditions are known as blindsight Types I and II. This Bartlett lecture narrates the discovery of blindsight and its mounting opposition, and it evaluates the continuing and often perplexing debate about its standing as a visual cognitive phenomenon.     

Categorization by People and Pigeons: The Twenty-second Bartlett Memorial Lecture

In one set of experiments, the experience of categorizing sets of variable exemplars of two categories enhanced subjects' ability to discriminate between two new instances of one of these categories. In a second set, subjects that had categorized two sets of exemplars responded more accurately to the hitherto unseen prototype than to a new exemplar close to the category boundary; but in some cases they responded even more accurately to a new exemplar, even further from the category boundary, than to the prototype. In both sets of experiments, people and pigeons behaved in similar ways. The implication is that at least in some situations human behaviour is controlled by a relatively simple set of associative processes, whose operations have been elucidated by conditioning experiments in animals.     

Associative relations in instrumental learning: The eighteenth Bartlett memorial lecture

Instrumental learning involves three primary events: a stimulus (S), a response (R), and an outcome (O). Evidence is reviewed indicating the presence of binary associations among those events, as well as a hierarchical structure of the form S-(R-O). Experiments examining the conditions that produce learning, the content of the learning once it has occurred, and the way learning maps into performance all suggest the presence of such a hierarchical structure.     

Bartlett revisited: Direct comparison of repeated reproduction and serial reproduction techniques

Bartlett developed the procedures of repeated reproduction (the same person repeatedly recalling information) and serial reproduction (people transmitting information from one person to another). Our experiment directly compared recall accuracy across these two techniques, which has not previously been reported, using DRM word lists. Recall of the initial study list words remained constant across repeated reproductions but declined markedly across serial reproductions. In contrast, recall of associated words that were not originally studied (i.e. critical words) was steady across both conditions. Because more of the original list words were forgotten across each link of the serial reproduction chain, the proportion of critical items recalled (relative to list words) increased significantly as the list passed between people. Using output bound scoring, serial reproduction resulted in lower accuracy than repeated reproduction by the final recall trial. Our results are broadly consistent with Bartlett's (1932) informal observations: Serial reproduction produces greater forgetting of the original material than does repeated reproduction and also leads to greater distortion relative to the proportion of correct material recalled.     

The 33rd Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture Cognitive neuropsychiatry and delusional belief

Cognitive neuropsychiatry is a new field of cognitive psychology which seeks to learn more about the normal operation of high-level aspects of cognition such as belief formation, reasoning, decision making, theory of mind, and pragmatics by studying people in whom such processes are abnormal. So far, the high-level cognitive process most widely studied in cognitive neuropsychiatry has been belief formation, investigated by examining people with delusional beliefs. This paper describes some of the forms of delusional belief that have been examined from this perspective and offers a general two-deficit cognitive-neuropsychiatric account of delusional belief.     

Bartlett revisited: reconfiguration of long-term memory in young and older adults

This study was performed after the tradition of F. C. Bartlett (1932), who demonstrated that memory reconfigures over time. The authors investigated the memory of young and older adults to examine the degree to which the aging process influences reconfigurative tendencies. From an initial sample of 53 participants, 20 young and 19 older adults completed 6 tests of recall for Bartlett's original text materials over an 84-day period. Consistent with the broad conclusions of Bartlett's study, reconfiguration was observed: Both young and older adults introduced errors into memory. Older adult recall was lower overall than that of young adults, and recall performance diminished over time. However, there was no difference between the performances of young and older adults with respect to incorrectly recalled intrusive elements.     

Bartlett Revisited: Reconfiguration of Long-Term Memory in Young and Older Adults

This study was performed after the tradition of F. C. Bartlett (1932), who demonstrated that memory reconfigures over time. The authors investigated the memory of young and older adults to examine the degree to which the aging process influences reconfigurative tendencies. From an initial sample of 53 participants, 20 young and 19 older adults completed 6 tests of recall for Bartlett's original text materials over an 84-day period. Consistent with the broad conclusions of Bartlett's study, reconfiguration was observed: Both young and older adults introduced errors into memory. Older adult recall was lower overall than that of young adults, and recall performance diminished over time. However, there was no difference between the performances of young and older adults with respect to incorrectly recalled intrusive elements.     

The 28th Bartlett Memorial Lecture Causal learning: An associative analysis

The concordance between performance and judgements of the causal effectiveness of an instrumental action suggests that such actions are mediated by causal knowledge. Although causal learning exhibits many associative phenomena—blocking, inhibitory or preventative learning, and super-learning—judgements of the causal status of a cue can be changed retrospectively as a result of learning episodes that do not directly involve the cue. In order to explain retrospective revaluation, a modified associative theory is described in which the learning processes for retrieved cue representations are the opposite to those for presented cues, and this theory is evaluated by studies of the role of within-compound associations in retrospective revaluation and blocking. However, this modified theory only applies when the within-compound association represents a contiguous rather than a causal cue relationship.     

Does it all go together when it goes? The nineteenth Bartlett memorial lecture

As groups of people age, the differences in the cognitive abilities of the most and least able become more extreme. This increase in between-individual variance is accompanied by an increase in within-individual variance: the difference between individuals' levels of performance on their best and least well retained skills. The implications of increasing between-individual variance are discussed in terms of the range of different factors that may affect cognitive ageing. Increases in within-individual variance are discussed in terms of differences betweeen “fluid” and “crystallized” abilities. The usefulness of this distinction and its functional implications are questioned. The hypothesis that age-related declines in “fluid” abilities are best modelled in terms of declines in a single factor is evaluated. Evidence is presented of disparate rates of decline, even of “fluid” cognitive abilities, such as performance on IQ tests, ability on information-processing tasks, and efficiency on memory tasks. Data from large-scale cross-sectional studies suggests that cognitive skills do not “all go together when they go”, but that there may, rather, be characteristic patterns, or syndromes, of cognitive ageing.