All In The Mind

This week, a chance to travel back in time with another great experiment in the history of psychology. Our understanding of memory, and its profound fallibility and fragility, was radically changed by renowned British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett - all thanks to a benign game of Chinese Whispers...and a ghost story. NB: Copyrighted audio for this program is on the BBC's website - see more info

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

We are unable to provide the audio and transcripts for this two part BBC series because of copyright reasons. Audio is available on the BBC website alongwith more information about the series. See link below (current as of 28/2/05). And to check out All in the Mind's full archive of transcripts click here

Further Information

BBC Radio 4 website for this episode of the Mind Changers series
When the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett was working at Cambridge University during the First World War, memory had only just started to be considered a psychological rather than a philosophical subject. A German psychologist called Herman Ebbinghaus dominated the field. He had spent days at a time learning lists of nonsense words, testing himself to see precisely how many he could remember. But a game of Chinese Whispers gave Bartlett an idea which he developed into a radically different approach to the study of memory. He discovered that when he asked people to repeat an unfamiliar story they had read, they changed it to fit their existing knowledge, and it was this revised story which then became incorporated into their memory. Bartlett's findings led him to propose 'schema' - the cultural and historical contextualisation of memory, which has important implications for eyewitness testimony and false memory syndrome, and even for artificial intelligence!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/mindchangers3.shtml

Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia) article on Frederic Bartlett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Bartlett

Publication

Title: Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology
Author : by F. C. Bartlett, Introduction by Walter Kintsch.
September 1995, Paperback and Hardback. ISBN: 0521483565