Sir Frederic Bartlett and the Method of Description
How to understand memories modification on experimental psychology..
Posted November 11, 2021 | Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster
- Sir Frederic Bartlett was a experimental psychologist at Cambridge University.
- Bartlett developed the remembering theory based on experimental evidences about the nature of memory.
- He classified some memories' modification in importation or transferences based on method of description.
Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886-1969) was a British psychologist known for his studies of memory and imagination . He was the first professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge University, where he worked until his retirement in 1951. Bartlett published around 200 titles .
One of his best-known works is Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932). He explored important characteristics of memory, moving away from previous studies that considered it a storage place and theorizing how it is constituted in the cultural environment. He conducted a series of experiments on perception, imagination, and memory, allowing him to create a theory that took each of these processes into account. He developed three methods: the description method, the repeated reproduction method, and the serial reproduction method. This post focuses on the first of these.
Method of Description
Bartlett presented five images of officers’ faces (marine, military, or officer; Figure 1). The experiment was carried out with 20 participants during the first days of the First World War when interest in military service was widespread. This influenced the attitude of the participants. Bartlett (1932) justified the use of these figures on the grounds that they were sufficiently similar to each other to make their grouping easy; at the same time, each face had well-defined individual features.
The participants had to view each card twice for 10 seconds. After a 30-minute break, they were asked to describe in detail all the cards following the order in which they were presented and answer some questions about the characteristics of the figures. A week later, the participants were asked to describe the cards again and answer further questions. The procedure was repeated over longer intervals without the cards and without the participants knowing that a new description would be requested.
The Influence of Mental Images and Language
In analyzing the data on recall, Bartlett (1932) observed the process by which subjects retrieved the details of the figures and the order in which they did so. He identified several characteristics, including the influence of mental images, language (verbalization), affective/attitude aspects, and social and cultural contexts.
On the other hand, words and phrases can have a smaller range of description, but they can be superior tools if the issue has to do with recalling the order or sequence of objects. In addition, he noted how the context of the time (i.e., the beginning of World War I) influenced attitude and affectivity when participants remembered the details of the figures. In each of the experiments, they tended to conventionalize the features of the faces to a standard shape, in line with what was being widely publicized at the time of the war.
This idea is similar to the notion of suggestible memories introduced by Elizabeth Loftus (1996) in her discussion of the creation of false memories (you can read about false memories by clicking here ). However, the big difference is that in the model proposed by Bartlett, this memory characteristic allows the construction of new meanings and the re-signification of past experiences. It is not just about distortions or false information created by the imagination but constructed meanings, as was later discussed by Vygotsky, Leontiev, and Luria.
Transferences and Importations: Modifications of Memory
When analyzing his data in the method of description, Bartlett (1932) pointed out certain characteristics of recall: the change in the order of presentation of cards; transfers of details from one card to another; and imports of external elements that were not part of any card.
Transfers concerned the details that participants transferred from one figure to another. Bartlett stated that six of the 20 participants transferred details from one image to another. Some transfers that took place were based on the numbering of the faces in Figure 1:
- Four transfers from card II to card I
- Two transfers from card I to card II
- Three transfers from card III to card I
- One transfer from card II to card III
- One transfer from card IV to card III
- One transfer from card I to card IV
Bartlett (1932) noted that the most frequently transferred element was the hat, possibly because all the characters wore one. Imports (i.e., elements inserted into the figures) were mental creations of the participants. Bartlett observed that 13 participants imported 19 external elements in the first description of the cards.
In the second description (a week later), imports rose to 24, although only 10 participants were analyzed. In the third description, there were 19 imports. The results demonstrated that the greater the time interval for recall, the greater the tendency to invent or import new materials from different contexts and insert them into objects (Bartlett, 1932).
Bartlett’s description method advanced understanding of the nature of memory - the influence of cultural elements in particular. He later proposed the concept of schema to explain how new elements were incorporated into information recall.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press.
Loftus, E. F. (1996). Eyewitness testimony. Harvard University Press.
João R. R. T. da Silva, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in Science Education at Federal University of Pernambuco, Caruaru, Brazil.
- Find Counselling
- Find a Support Group
- Find Online Therapy
- United Kingdom
- Asperger's
- Bipolar Disorder
- Chronic Pain
- Eating Disorders
- Passive Aggression
- Personality
- Goal Setting
- Positive Psychology
- Stopping Smoking
- Low Sexual Desire
- Relationships
- Child Development
- Self Tests NEW
- Therapy Center
- Diagnosis Dictionary
- Types of Therapy
Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.
- Emotional Intelligence
- Gaslighting
- Affective Forecasting
- Neuroscience
- Subscriber Services
- For Authors
- Publications
- Archaeology
- Art & Architecture
- Bilingual dictionaries
- Classical studies
- Encyclopedias
- English Dictionaries and Thesauri
- Language reference
- Linguistics
- Media studies
- Medicine and health
- Names studies
- Performing arts
- Science and technology
- Social sciences
- Society and culture
- Overview Pages
- Subject Reference
- English Dictionaries
- Bilingual Dictionaries
Recently viewed (0)
- Save Search
- Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter
Related Content
Related overviews, more like this.
Show all results sharing these subjects:
serial reproduction
Quick reference.
A technique for studying memory in a social context, popularized by the English psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886–1969) in his book Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932, Chapters 7–8) and usually attributed to him, but in fact introduced by the US psychologist Ernest Norton Henderson (1869–1967) in an article in the journal Psychological Review in 1903, surprisingly not cited by Bartlett. It involves a person reading a short story (typically about 100 words long) and recounting it from memory to a second person, who then recounts it from memory to a third, and so on in the manner of the children's game of Chinese whispers, the phenomena of assimilation (5), levelling (1), and sharpening becoming obvious after about eight transmissions. The technique has been used as a laboratory model of rumour transmission. In some studies, the original stimulus is a drawing that is serially reproduced from memory by each of the participants or subjects in turn. See also War of the Ghosts. Compare successive reproduction.
From: serial reproduction in A Dictionary of Psychology »
Subjects: Science and technology — Psychology
Related content in Oxford Reference
Reference entries, serial reproduction n..
View all related items in Oxford Reference »
Search for: 'serial reproduction' in Oxford Reference »
- Oxford University Press
PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice ).
date: 24 August 2024
- Cookie Policy
- Privacy Policy
- Legal Notice
- Accessibility
- [185.39.149.46]
- 185.39.149.46
Character limit 500 /500
- Help & FAQ
Bartlett revisited: Direct comparison of repeated reproduction and serial reproduction techniques
Research output : Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 266-271 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2014 |
| Externally published | Yes |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Clinical Psychology
- Applied Psychology
- DRM paradigm
- Errors of memory
- F.C. Bartlett
- Input-bound scoring
- Output-bound scoring
- Repeated reproduction
- Serial reproduction
Access to Document
- 10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.05.004
Other files and links
- Link to publication in Scopus
- Link to the citations in Scopus
Fingerprint
- Repeated Reproduction Keyphrases 100%
- Reproduction Techniques Keyphrases 100%
- Reproductive Procedure Medicine and Dentistry 100%
- Word List Keyphrases 16%
- Output Bounds Keyphrases 16%
T1 - Bartlett revisited
T2 - Direct comparison of repeated reproduction and serial reproduction techniques
AU - Roediger, Henry L.
AU - Meade, Michelle L.
AU - Gallo, David A.
AU - Olson, Kristina R.
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2014 Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.
PY - 2014/12/1
Y1 - 2014/12/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - DRM paradigm
KW - Errors of memory
KW - F.C. Bartlett
KW - Input-bound scoring
KW - Output-bound scoring
KW - Repeated reproduction
KW - Serial reproduction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84920560764&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84920560764&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.05.004
DO - 10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.05.004
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84920560764
SN - 2211-3681
JO - Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
JF - Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
- Share full article
For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.
- Apple Podcasts
- Google Podcasts
At the Democratic Convention, a Historic Nomination
What story did the democrats tell about kamala harris and will it be enough to win.
Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise
Featuring Astead W. Herndon and Reid J. Epstein
Produced by Lynsea Garrison Rob Szypko Jessica Cheung Asthaa Chaturvedi and Shannon Lin
Edited by Rachel Quester
Original music by Rowan Niemisto Marion Lozano Dan Powell and Diane Wong
Engineered by Chris Wood
Listen and follow ‘The Daily’ Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadio
Last night, at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination, becoming the first woman of color in U.S. history to do so.
Astead W. Herndon and Reid J. Epstein, who cover politics for The Times, discuss the story this convention told about Ms. Harris — and whether that story could be enough to win the presidential election.
On today’s episode
Astead W. Herndon , a national politics reporter and the host of the politics podcast “ The Run-Up ” for The New York Times.
Reid J. Epstein , who covers politics for The New York Times.
Background reading
Kamala Harris promised to chart a “new way forward” as she accepted the nomination.
“The Run-Up”: It’s her party now. What’s different?
There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.
We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.
The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.
Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman.
Astead W. Herndon is a national politics reporter and the host of the politics podcast “The Run-Up.” More about Astead W. Herndon
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More about Reid J. Epstein
Advertisement
COMMENTS
Although Wiener may well have given him a helpful nudge, Bartlett must have been invoking this "origin myth" to distance himself - and his department of experimental psychology - from his earlier deep commitment to social psychology and social anthropology. The method of serial reproduction had already been widely used by the early British anthropologists, Pitt-Rivers and Balfour, as ...
serial reproduction technique and the repeated reproduc tion technique. In serial reproduction, a subject is exposed to some material, such as a story, and then tries to recall it. A second subject reads the first subject'saccount ofthe original event and tries to recall that. The third subject reads the second subject'saccount, and so on ...
serial reproduction method to study cultural transmission. At the outset of his career, Bartlett was interested in cul-. tural change and the e ffect of contacts between cultures. (e.g., Bartlett ...
He developed three methods: the description method, the repeated reproduction method, and the serial reproduction method. This post focuses on the first of these. Method of Description
serial reproduction method are much greater than those in repeated reproduction, although Bartlett thought the same types of memory processes were at work (but in greater force). The serial re-production technique involves a human chain, and if there were to be one weak link in the chain - someone who was wildly inaccurate in recall -
serial reproduction n. A technique for studying memory in a social context, popularized by the English psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886-1969) in his book Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932, Chapters 7-8) and usually attributed to him, but in fact introduced by the US psychologist Ernest Norton ...
Since these biases have an effect each time people reconstruct a stimulus from memory, Serial reproduction can magnify what might be small ef-fects in the context of a standard memory task. Controlled experiments in serial reproduction might thus be a valuable tool for exploring memory biases in a variety of domains.
The primary purpose of our experiments was to attempt to confirm the observation that serial reproduction leads to greater distortion of the originally presented material than repeated reproduction, implied if not explicitly stated in Bartlett's (1932) writings. We did show this using output-bound scoring, which is also the way Bartlett ...
The plan of the paper is as follows. Section 2 lays out the Bayesian account of serial reproduction. In Section 3 we show how this Bayesian account corresponds to the AR(1) process. Sections 4 and. 5 present two experiments testing the model's prediction that serial reproduction reveals memory biases.
A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett's experiments | The claim that memory is constructive or reconstructive is no longer controversial in psychology.
The ROCK tool includes a measure procedure through behavioral experiments, and its corresponding data analysis. The core experimental method of this tool is the serial reproduction paradigm ...
serial reproduction. Share button. Updated on 04/19/2018. a method for studying memory in which one person reads a set of information before reproducing it for another person, who then reproduces it for a third person, who does the same for a fourth, and so on. Serial reproduction is widely regarded as a model for the social communication of ...
The primary purpose of the experiment was to test the hypothesis, derived from Bartlett's (1932) writings, that serial reproduction results in greater errors than does repeated reproduction. Toward this end, we presented participants with the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) word lists shown to elicit memory errors (Deese, 1959, Roediger and ...
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.
iments on the serial reproduction of relatively accessible prose (Bartlett, 1932, p. 171 et seq.): Under the conditions of the present experiment all the stories tend to be shorn of their individualizing features, the descrip-tive passages lose more of the peculiarities of style and matter that they may possess, and the arguments tend to be reduced
A primary function of human vision is to encode and recall spatial information about visual scenes. We developed an experimental paradigm that reveals the structure of human spatial memory priors in unprecedented detail. We ran a series of 85 large-scale online experiments with 9,202 participants that paint an intricate picture of these priors.
This question is explored through a serial reproduction analysis of experiments purporting to replicate Bartlett's study. The focus is on the transformation of terminology used to describe qualitative changes introduced by subjects into reproductions. In this history a diversity of terms, coming from different intellectual sources, is ...
Experiment 3: serial reproduction with no training on priorsExperiments 1 and 2 tried to establish different prior distributions for reconstruction from memory by providing training on different categories of fish. One possible explanation for why the serial reproduction chains did not converge to stationary distributions that matched these ...
By contrast, classical studies in social psychology suggest that SC information is retained well in the collective remembering where a number of individuals are involved in the reproduction of stories. In the present experiment, individual and collective remembering were examined.
The serial reproduction of Bartlett' s experiments Bartlett's experiments have been replicated and extended in numerous experiments spanning decades of research.
This study investigates the changes that occur in the serial reproduction of lists of words that vary in their associational relationship with each other. Lists of words were presented to groups of Ss; the results were based on the responses of the group as a whole. It was hypothesized that the closer the association relationship of words, the greater the ease of recall; the less the ...
Serial passage experiments are a form of experimental evolution that is frequently used in applied sciences; for example, in vaccine development. ... Unfortunately, avoiding evolution technically is not possible. This is because any time organism reproduction is involved there will be selection for faster reproduction. Similarly, any time ...
Studying how single DNA molecules behave helps us to better understand genetic disorders and design better drugs. Until now however, examining DNA molecules one-by-one was a slow process.
The Sunday Read: 'The Man Who Couldn't Stop Going to College'