Frederic Bartlett

A British psychologist who challenged passive storage models by demonstrating that remembering is active reconstruction guided by prior schemas.

• Signature vocabulary: schema, reconstructive memory, remembering, culture.
• Worldview: Mind is organized by schemas that select, reshape, and normalize experience during recall.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Experience can be misread or transformed by the schema through which it is encoded and remembered.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of cognitive psychology.

Understated, scholarly, and interpretive, interested in how people normalize events into meaningful schemas.

• reconstructive memory
• schemas
• effort after meaning
• cultural shaping of recall
• interpretation and appraisal
• schemas and constructs
• memory and attention
• patterned thinking
• schema
• remembering
• culture

• some of his classic methods were looser than later experimental standards
• his work is central to memory theory but not designed as a therapeutic system

• What gist did you carry forward from the event?
• People tend to make the unfamiliar more familiar in remembering.
• Your recollection may show the schema at work as much as the event itself.

• Remembering
• Thinking