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James Ward's Active Organizing Subject心理学空间2Eb+^3}MG5FS#t

James Ward (1843-1925) was Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at Cambridge when Bartlett arrived as an undergraduate. Ward had studied with Lotze in Germany; and was instrumental in bringing the work of the new German experimental tradition to Britain by translating the work of  Weber and Fechner on psychophysics. One of the first psychological texts that Bartlett read was Ward's article on 'Psychology' inEncyclopedia Britannica. In this widely read article Ward attacked atomistic associationism and developed a new psychology that  emphasized the role of the active organizing subject. One of Bartlett's students, Mary Northway, described his psychology as essentially Wardian, and Ward's influence is plain in several aspects of the view of memory Bartlett put forward inRemembering. 心理学空间H)B.c^3L g~;w_

In line with Ward's focus on the active organizing subject Bartlett viewed the process of remembering as an active, dynamic, inferential process that is better characterized as constructive than reproductive. He begins his summary of the repeated reproduction results with this point: "Accuracy of reproduction, in a literal sense, is the rare exception and not the rule" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 93). This constructive process was memorably described by Bartlett thus: "It is fitting to speak of every human cognitive reaction - perceiving, imaging, remembering, thinking and reasoning - as an effort after meaning" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 44). The constructive nature of recall leads to the following changes in any reproduction of material: omisisons, condensations, elaborations, transpositions, transformations, and, less frequently, importations. As a counterpoint to his focus on invention and importation, Bartlett recognized the strong countervailing tendency of his participants to stereotypy. In summarizing the repeated reproduction experiments, Bartlett stated: "The most general characteristic of the whole of this group of experiments was the persisitence, for any given subject, of the 'form' of his first reproduction" (Bartlett, 1932/1995, p. 83).

Ward's focus on the active subject is also apparent in the attention Bartlett paid to individual attitudes and responses. Bartlett was fascinated by the effect of "established interests" on subsequent recall. The text of Remembering is full of examples of people's occupations directing their perceptions and memory: early on Bartlett discussed the hypothetical example of the differences in what is noted by a landscape artist, a naturalist, and a geologist walking in the country (p. 4); a mathematician noted that a squiggle reminds him of a determinant and recalled it accurately several weeks later (p. 21); a minister saw Nebuchadnezzer's fiery furnace in an inkblot (p.38); the same blot reminded a physiologist of 'an exposure of the basal lumbar region of the digestive system as far back as the vertebral column up to the floating ribs' (p. 38); an anthropologist who later specialized in kinship rationalized the Ghosts of the War of the Ghosts story as a clan name (pp. 69-70); a painter visualized the whole scene of the War of the Ghosts and drew a plan of his imagery (p.72); a Swazi cattle herdsman demonstrated remarkably accurate memory for a group of cattle purchased a year previously (p. 249-251); and a geologist turned mining engineer produced a good copy of a map of an area of the Belgian Congo he prospected more than a year earlier (p. 251-252). These examples contribute to the liveliness and interest of the text, and point to Bartlett's recognition of the importance of expertise for the study of memory. This theme would later be developed much more fully within the Newell and Simon cognitive tradition with its emphasis on the role of past experience in producing experts' ability to meaningfully organize relevant material (Chase & Simon, 1973; Ericsson, 1985; Ericsson & Simon, 1993; Simon, 1981).心理学空间!PvvD+n IO

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W.H.R. Rivers' diffusionist anthropology

The importance of social factors in Bartlett's vision of psychology was derived from the social anthropology of one of his mentors, W.H.R. Rivers (1864-1922).  Rivers began his career as a medically trained researcher working in neurology (Whittle, 2000). As a young physician he assisted Victor Horsley in his early brain surgeries at Queen Square, London. In 1894 he came to Cambridge to teach physiology of the senses and experimental psychology. In 1898 he participated in the anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits between Australia and New Guinea led by Alfred Court Haddon and developed a new interest in the study of kinship systems and social organization. His psychological and anthropological careers continued on parallel tracks until 1910, with fieldwork trips to Southern India and Melanesia interspersed with experimental studies of the senses, most famously his work with Henry Head on the recovery of somatosensory sensitivity following the severing of cutaneous nerves in Head's arm. In the years leading up to World War I when Rivers was preparing his major anthropological text,A History of Melanesian Society, Bartlett was Rivers' undergraduate tutee at St. John's College, Cambridge. At this time Rivers was in the process of shifting his anthropological stance from an evolutionary perspective towards diffusionism, the study of cultural change as a result of contact between different groups of people, as he became aware of the effect of migrating peoples on indigenous groups in Melanesia. From Rivers' diffusionist perspective, any present-day society has emerged as a result of the blending of a complex variety of influences. For Rivers an important aspect of this process of blending as a result of contact between different peoples was theconventionalization of any new material or practices to make them fit with those already existent in the host culture.

The influence of Rivers' anthropology on Bartlett

When Bartlett entered Cambridge University his ambition was to become a Rivers' style social anthropologist (Bartlett, 1936). In a later unpublished autobiographical piece Bartlett described his early anthropological ambitions, 'At this time my thoughts were turning towards a future in Anthropology, and I hoped that eventually I might get some money and go, perhaps, to one of the wilder parts of the world.' (Bartlett, 1964, p. 7) Rivers himself persuaded Bartlett that the most appropriate training for such a career would be experimental laboratory work in psychophysics. When Charles Myers offered the freshly graduated Bartlett a laboratory assistantship in experimental psychology vacated by Cyril Burt's departure for London, Rivers urged him to accept, stating, 'should I become an Anthropologist I had better learn by experiment something about the fallibility of human evidence' (Bartlett, 1964, p. 13). On the basis of his own experience Rivers felt that the rigorous observational training provided by laboratory work in experimental psychology was highly beneficial in the training of anthropologists.心理学空间z0U4H7k5Y+m {

It was not Rivers' experimental psychology, however, that made the most impact on the young Bartlett, rather it was the concept of 'culture contact' derived from his diffusionistic anthropology. This is clear inPsychology and Primitive Culture;the major theme of this early text of Bartlett's is the psychological study of the contact of peoples and the transformations that arise due to the blending of cultures. This book is a particularly useful source for tracing the influence of Rivers' anthropology on Bartlett; it is based on a 1922 series of lectures that Rivers advised Bartlett to deliver at the Bedford College for Women in the University of London. Although he had already conducted his experimental studies on folk story reproduction for his fellowship thesis (Bartlett, 1917) and published a report of them (Bartlett, 1920), inPsychology and Primitive CultureBartlett did not report on any experimental studies, rather he reviewed the anthropological literature emphasizing the social determinants of human behavior. Bartlett's debt to Rivers is clear throughout the text from his frequent references to Rivers' work and ideas.  

 Bartlett's adoption of Rivers' interest in the cultural changes arising from the contact of different groups of people led him to a study of the changes that take place in folk stories as a result of their diffusion to different groups. He realized that alternative versions of the same stories took on characteristic twists in different cultural groups. Bartlett atttributed the conventionalization of a folk tale within a specific community to the operation of two inter-related social tendencies: conservation and constructiveness. The simultaneous operation of these two tendencies acted to both stabilize and transform the folk tale. According to Bartlett, 'plasticity is the opposite side of the conserving tendency - it is because the group is selectively conservative that it is also plastic. For the very changes which it accepts are, in large measure, the indirect outcome of its constant attempt to secure the persistence of the old.' (Bartlett, 1923, pp. 151-2). Bartlett's constructive model of memory is based on this analysis of cultural change resulting from the contact of different groups.心理学空间?4a;QH-F

In the experimental work that Bartlett conducted for his fellowship dissertation during the course of World War I, and later reported in his bookRemembering, he asked his participants to reproduce material, such as folk tales and drawings, in order to track the changes that occurred in either individual or group memory over the course of time. Bartlett demonstrated the conventionalizing process repeatedly with a variety of materials, most famously and extensively with his version of a native North American folk tale reported by anthropologist Franz Boas,The War of the Ghosts. His analysis of the both the constructive and conservative processes involved in individual and group remembering inRemembering echoed his earlier account of the transmission of material within a group through the transformative processes set in motion by culture contact. Rather than his experimental and cognitive interests replacing his early social interests they were intimately blended in his analysis of remembering.

It is important to note here that while Rivers' anthropological concepts of culture contact and the ensuing conventionalisation were vital to Bartlett's later analysis of perceiving, remembering and thinking, they were not in themselves sufficient for the full development and expression of his theory. InThinking Bartlett recounts the development of own experiments on Remembering, setting out how his method of serial reproduction methodology was initially inspired by James Ward's suggestion to use designs and things in series, his reading of Haddon's The Decorative Art of New Guinea, and Norbert Wiener's mention of the parlor game of 'Russian Scandal'. While Bartlett was conducting these experiments he considered them 'an all out experimental attack upon conventionalizing, in both its individual and social forms' (Bartlett, 1958, p. 143). After writing them up for his thesis, which was subtitled 'A contribution towards an experimental study of the processes of conventionalisation', he wrote a long essay with the same title and contracted with Cambridge University Press to produce a book on 'Conventionalization'. The work did not proceed smoothly, 'I laboured heavily through two or three chapters, but it did not go well. I tore up what I had written and for some time there followed a most unpleasant period when it seemed that I had taken a lot of steps to get nowhere at all.' (Bartlett, 1958, p. 144). Help came to Bartlett in the form of his memory of conversations with the neurologist Henry Head. Head had developed the concept of the bodily schema to explain the shaping of present motor behavior through past responses, and Bartlett transformed the notion to apply to the process of remembering. The resulting 'schema' is the concept that Bartlett became best known for in later work on memory in cognitive psychology. In his explanation of the resolution of his dilemma, Bartlett employed a 'culture contact' argument, 'critical moves in progress seemed most likely of all to come when different fields of experimental adventure were brought into contact. ...what made it possible to take the last step to a temporary termination of the long research into Remembering, came through contact with a field of study different from my own.' (Bartlett, 1958, p. 147). Bartlett employed Rivers' culture contact concept in many areas beyond the initial anthropological conception of contact between distinct cultural groups.  Bartlett's interest in the social, and specifically the notion of culture contact, was an enduring one.