What makes memory constructive a study in the serial reproduction of bartletts experiments

Here I concentrate my analysis on the terminology used to describe changes in ductions and how these terms themselves changed over time.. Bartlett’s constructivist approach: Between anth

Culture & Psychology

2017, Vol 23(2) 186–207

! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354067X17695759 journals.sagepub.com/home/cap

in relation to group dynamics in his book Psychology and Primitive Culture How did we getfrom one meaning of constructive to another? This question is explored through a serialreproduction 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 differentintellectual sources, is gradually subsumed under the single term ‘distortion’ Thus,psychologists have reconstructed Bartlett’s work based on their own background,other influences and their own project for the discipline, illustrating the very construct-ive processes Bartlett theorized

Corresponding author:

Brady Wagoner, Aalborg University, Kroghstræde 3, Aalborg Ø 9220, Denmark.

Email: wagoner@hum.aau.dk

influenced by the metaphor of mind as a computer When compared to the literalstorage of information on a hard disk the human mind was a poor performer.Thus, constructive here is a fault or vice of memory In contrast, constructive hasalso been understood as a positive, future-oriented characteristic of remembering inthat it ensures we can flexibly meet the challenges of a complex world filled withrapid change This was in fact how Bartlett (1932) conceptualized the term when heintroduced it in his classic work Remembering The two meanings of constructivehave been mixed in contemporary discussions of memory and at times integrated(see e.g., Schacter, 2012), though construction as distortion has taken the lead Thisarticle aims to provide some conceptual clarity to the term construction by explor-ing its transformations from Bartlett until the present day.

The article begins by describing Bartlett’s invention of the term in his studies ofcultural dynamics and how it provided a frame for his famous work on remember-ing It proceeds to highlight the terminology he used in his experimental studies toanalyze qualitative transformations found in participants’ reproductions We find adiversity of terms coming mostly from diffusionist anthropology but also Freudianpsychoanalysis and the experimental psychology of his day This then sets a base-line to explore how Bartlett’s own experiments were serially reproduced by laterresearchers, purporting to replicate and extend his work As with Bartlett’s ownanalysis, the focus will be on what is retained, omitted, and changed through aseries of reproductions In The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s psychology in recon-struction(Wagoner, 2017), I provided a detailed analysis of these replications Here

I concentrate my analysis on the terminology used to describe changes in ductions and how these terms themselves changed over time This will provide both

repro-a powerful crepro-ase of the very constructive processes Brepro-artlett theorized repro-and show howthe meaning of construction itself was changed

Bartlett’s constructivist approach: Between anthropology and psychology

Although Bartlett always saw constructive remembering as positive, oriented and adaptive, he used it to describe two different but related processes.This difference comes out more strongly when we compare the use of ‘constructive’

future-in his well-known book Rememberfuture-ing (1932) to the way it is employed future-in his earlierbook Psychology and Primitive Culture (1923) The earlier work aimed to develop ageneral theory of cultural dynamics that later served as an analogy to develop histheory of remembering Sketching out the influences coming from anthropologywill put us in a better position to understand the terms he used to analyze hisexperiments These experiments were first framed as ‘a contribution towards anexperimental study of the process of conventionalization’ (Bartlett, 1916) and onlymuch later as being about ‘remembering’ The term conventionalization comesfrom anthropology, where it described the process by which cultural elementstransmitted from one cultural or social group go through a series of transforma-tions until they arrive at a relatively stable form characteristic of the receipt group

In Bartlett’s (1932) own repeated reproduction experiments, where he had pants reproduce a Native American folk story called War of the Ghosts afterincreasing time intervals, he found it was transformed by people living inCambridge to look more and more like an English story.

partici-Bartlett’s theory of cultural dynamics was a further development of diffusionistanthropology, especially as it was practiced by his Cambridge mentors WilliamHaddon and WHR Rivers (see also Rosa, 1996) Haddon (1894, 1895) explored thevariations and development of decorative art forms with an analogy to howDarwin had looked at the spread and evolution of species (Rolda´n, 1992).However, in contrast to Darwin, Haddon also believed there was a tendency tomove from concrete figurative motifs to abstract, geometrical ones This can beseen in Figure 1, which depicts various alligator derived designs from the Chiriquigroup of Central America In the top series, the alligator body is simplified to a

Figure 1 Derivations of an alligator amongst the Chiriqui (Haddon, 1895, p 171)

symmetrical line and dot The line’s shape is a conventionalized representation ofthe alligator within the group, which can be modified in a number of differentdirections The middle design illustrates an elaborated version of the conventionalsign for an alligator, as in D, in which there is a tail and mouth at both ends Thespiral shape is a common motif found cross-culturally to provide closure to adesign, such as in ionic columns (Valsiner, 2014) The bottom series shows howthe design is elaborated with triangles surrounding the line representing the alliga-tor’s body At the end of the series (F) the bodyline has disappeared and we are leftwith the geometric pattern of triangles This pattern is ‘reduplicated’ or ‘multi-plicated,’ a process Haddon referred to as ‘the characteristic device of the decora-tive mind’ (quoted in Bartlett, 1932, p 182) In these designs we see simplificationand elaboration, mixing and blending of forms, and the flexible adaptation ofpatterns to particular conditions (e.g., within a narrow band as with both series

in Figure 1)

These processes of diffusion are by no means unique to isolated, small nities In the article by Awad (2017), in this issue, there is an example of graffitiimages developing from an event in which a veiled female protestor is beaten andstriped revealing her blue bra Graffiti artists represented the event in differentways, one of which transformed the protestor into a superhero with blue bra.Over time, however, a simplified image of simply a blue bra was enough to sym-bolize the event and solidarity to the values of the Egyptian revolution, feminismand resistance to oppression Bartlett’s own experimental studies also aptly demon-strated this process, especially using his method of serial reproduction with images.Participants were shown an image from a foreign culture and then asked to repro-duce it typically after 15 minutes The first participant’s reproduction was thenshown to a second participant, who was instructed to do the same The procedurewas repeated with a third and so on, like the party game ‘telephone,’ ‘Chinesewhispers’ or ‘Russian scandal’ (the game itself has taken on new names as it spreads

commu-to different groups) Figure 2 illustrates a series of reproductions produced usingthis method The original stimulus was an African representation of a face with textbelow it reading ‘Portrait d’homme’ Like Haddon (1895), Bartlett (1932) analyzesthe series as illustrating a progressive tendency towards conventional representa-tion: There is much ‘elaboration’ of the figure through tilting the face vertically,giving it an oval and then round shape, and adding features such as eyes, eyebrows,

a nose, and a mouth In the last two drawings we find ‘simplification’ taking thelead over ‘elaboration’ and we are left with a conventional figure resembling amodern day smiley face

The diffusionist approach in anthropology developed as an alternative to tural evolutionism’s idea that societies evolve through uniform stages but at dif-ferent rates By contrast the diffusionists argued that a society’s complexityindicated that it had a history of contacts with other groups For example, thedifferent kinds of burial practices found in Melanesian society showed a history of

cul-contact with groups having different customs (Rivers, 1914) Rather than sizing independent invention, as did cultural evolution, the diffusionists saw con-tact between groups as the greatest stimulus to social change and the development

empha-of new cultural forms Following this tradition Bartlett (1923) argued that anindividual living in a ‘primitive’ (or what we would today call ‘traditional’) societieshad little space for invention without contact with other groups:

He may analyze; he may be the source of much reduplication; he may make newpatterns of the old material; he may introduce peculiar interpretations; but in theactual invention of new detail he is practically helpless, unless he has access to com-munities outside his own and of a different culture It is this, beyond anything else,which .acts as the spur to those constructive processes as a result of which newforms of social organization may be achieved; new cultures produced; and radicalchanges brought into being (Bartlett, 1923, p 238)

Group contact often results in cultural forms being created that were not found

in either group before their meeting This happens by bringing together two ferent and often conflicting cultural practices into a new form or what Rivers

dif-Figure 2 Series of reproductions produced through Bartlett’s (1932) method of serial duction (pp 178–179)

described as a ‘compromise formation,’ using psychoanalytic language In thisprocess, the ‘mixing’ and ‘blending’ of cultural forms are widespread Bartlett(1923, p 281ff) gave the example of the growth of a new religious cult within aNative American community The process was triggered by a man who brought thedrug peyote to his community after having encountered it on his travels toOklahoma Although development of a new cult was stimulated by the introduc-tion of a new cultural object, it grew on the foundations of the group’s old prac-tices, such as the use of a sacred mound that was used in a buffalo dance ritual ofthe earlier religion Later, Christian elements like the Bible were further incorpo-rated into the cult through other group contacts Bartlett emphasized that thegrowth of the cult was not planned by any single individual, but rather involvedthe weaving together of a number of scattered influences, a process he called ‘socialconstructiveness’ (Bartlett, 1923, 1928, 1932).

In Psychology and Primitive Culture, Bartlett (1923) opposed the tendencies of

‘conservation’ of the past and ‘construction’ of the new While Bartlett saw mitive’ or ‘traditional’ cultures to be primarily conservative, this did not mean thatthey held rigidly to their traditions: ‘‘it is because the group is selectively conser-vative that it is also plastic’’ (Bartlett, 1923, pp 151–152) Cultural patterns of thegroup are flexibly carried forward and adapted to new circumstances This descrip-tion directly parallels Bartlett’s (1932) conceptualization of schema as organizedmass of past reactions adapted to the particular demands of the individual’s presentenvironment (Wagoner, 2013) For example, a stroke in a game of tennis is chan-neled through a history of previous stokes but is also flexibly adjusted to thespecific context in which the new stroke must be made Rather than describingthis as a ‘conservative’ tendency as he did with social groups, Bartlett (1932) begins

‘pri-to include it as part of a general theory of what makes remembering ‘constructive’.This was probably done to further emphasize that memory should not be thought

of as a static register of the past in the form of isolated traces left on the mind/brain, but rather as a living process that responds to environmental conditions.Interestingly, while Bartlett was conducting his famous experiments on remember-ing he was also treating traumatized soldiers at the Cambridge hospital and readingFreud’s works for inspiration From this experience he argued that even the experi-mental psychology must analyze psychological response in light of their history likethe clinician and ethnographer As an experimentalist, he also adapted a number ofpsychoanalytic terms to analyze qualitative transformations in reproductions (seebelow) In short, both the cultural patterns of the social group and the schema ofthe individual describe a way in which the past as an organized standard is adap-table to meet present demands

While the first notion of ‘constructive’ highlights the flexible adaptation of a paststandard to the present, the second more radical notion of construction was used

by Bartlett to describe the process of welding together elements from divergentsources into a new form In relation to social groups we saw this above in Bartlett’s(1923) description of the peyote cult’s emergence, where it was given the name

‘social constructiveness’ It is here that Bartlett emphasized a group’s ‘prospect’ orproject for the future instead of simply an assimilation of the new to the group’sexisting cultural patterns In a similar vein, Bartlett (1958) saw original scientistsand scientific research areas as ‘constructive’ in integrating different fields ofresearch to shed new light on the phenomenon of interest Like the notion

of ‘prospect’, the scientist must be able to ‘predict’ or ‘prophesize’ what lines ofinvestigation will be fruitful in the future In regards to remembering, Bartlettemphasized the process involved much more than the rudimentary use of schema

as one finds in bodily habits, such as playing tennis Instead, it is a reflective process

in which the person ‘‘turn[s] around upon [one’s] own schemata and construct[s]them afresh’’ (Bartlett, 1932, p 206)—what might today be called ‘meta-cognition’

or ‘meta-memory’ Human beings do not simply input and output memories; theyconstruct them through the integration of a number of different influences in order

to satisfy a present interest and elaborate a coherent meaning Bartlett (1932, pp.304–305) described the process in the following:

There first occurs the arousal of an attitude, an orientation, an interest Then specificdetail, either in image or in direct word form, tends to be set up Finally there is aconstruction of other detail in such a way as to provide a rational, or satisfactorysetting for the attitude

The fact that we are constantly reconstructing our memories on the basis of newrelations was for Bartlett a positive characteristic in that it provided flexibility in aworld full of change It allows us to make new connections between different domains

of experience and thereby increases our variability of response across contexts.Bartlett’s own approach is an illustrative example of constructively bringingtogether different streams of ideas to develop a fresh approach to the perennialquestion of what happens when we remember This can clearly be appreciated inthe terminology he used to describe transformations of reproductions in hisexperiments In the list below we see a wide range of different terms, most ofwhich come from either diffusionist anthropology or Freudian psychoanalysis.There are also terms from earlier experimental research in psychology, such as

‘retention’ This is not an exhaustive list but will suffice to create a baseline toexplore how replications and extensions of Bartlett’s experiments have selectivelyborrowed terms, changed their meaning, omitted many more, incorporated termsfrom other sources and invented new terms to meet their particular researchcontexts and questions The word ‘constructive’ can be seen as a broad termthat covers all of these changes It comes from McDougall’s (1908) book onsocial psychology, where it describes an instinct—for example, nest building inbirds Bartlett clearly gave it a much more general, metaphorical meaning: first,

at the level of groups and then as an analogy to describe psychological cesses, such as remembering The next section will consider which terms wereselected and developed by others, and how the notion of constructive changedwith them

The serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments

Bartlett’s experiments have been replicated and extended in numerous experimentsspanning decades of research As such, they provide an interesting case study toexplore changes in the discipline of psychology from Bartlett’s time until today Inorder to do this, I created (what I believe to be) an exhaustive list of experimentalstudies, up until 1999, that claim to replicate and extend his theory using hismethods of repeated or serial reproduction These studies were coded for thedifferent terms used to describe changes in a series of reproductions of some mate-rial, each indicating some aspect or factor of memory construction Table 1 out-lines the general results of this analysis, in which Bartlett’s original study and some

of the terms he used are on the top row In each row that follows the terms used in

a replication study are vertically paired with Bartlett’s terms Sometimes this nection between terms was conceptual rather than indicating the use of the sameword The italicized terms indicate that they were borrowed from Gestalt psychol-ogy, which makes up an important part of the analysis In what follows I willprovide a more detailed and contextualized picture of what is presented in thetable by describing each study and highlighting key points of conceptual transfor-mation through the history of replications The history is grouped around threetrends: (1) social group comparisons in the first decade of replications; (2) replica-tions incorporating Gestalt psychology in the 1940s and 1950s; and (3) the gradualemergence of the psychology of memory ‘distortion’ and ‘error’

con-Social group comparisons

Authors of the earliest studies (Maxwell, 1936; Nadel, 1937; Northway, 1936) haddirect contact with Bartlett and thus it is little surprising that they were very close

to his analytic approach Yet, they focused on the social and cultural aspect of his

Table 1 Terminological changes in replications of Bartlett’s experiments.

Bartlett (1932) Retention

of details

Omission Simplification Elaboration Conventionalization

assimilation

Rationalization Importation Condensation Etc.

Maxwell (1936) Surviving Omission Shortening Invention

Addition Elaboration

Rationalization

Addition Modification

Conventionalization Rationalization Reversing

Substitution Nadel (1937) Descriptive details

Leveling Sharpening Assimilation

Hall (1950) Omission Simplification Distortion Conventionalisation

Assimilation Regularity

(major and minor)

Gauld and

Stephenson (1967)

Distortion Error

Wynn and Logie (1998)

work, asking how group membership shapes remembering This was done bycomparing the reproduction chains of distinct social groups, for a story created

by each researcher to potentially connect up with a range of different social ests Construction was seen in the progressive transformation of material towardsgroup interests and norms Maxwell’s (1936) story mentioned religion, sport,society, and domestic activities and had 12 different groups serially reproduce it,including priests, physics students, soldiers, and boy-scouts His analysis firstlooked at how mistakes intentionally built into the story (e.g., a knife is pulledout of a person who earlier was said to be shot in the head) were ‘rationalized’ or

inter-‘smoothed over’ by participants through omission or changing of details lization was used by all the studies in the 1930s but in later studies it was omitted).Further, he compared what was common and distinct for the different socialgroups in relation to ‘inventions and additions,’ ‘shortening’ and the materialthat ‘survives’ through the series

(rationa-Northway (1936) compared differences in recall for children with different ages(i.e., 10 and 14 to 15 year olds) and social backgrounds (i.e., from three differentToronto schools with different traditions and socio-economic levels) A centralpart of her analysis focused on the ‘recasting of material’ in the serial reproduc-tion chains of different groups ‘Recasting’ was her own terminological invention

to describe when ‘‘the story is given a different form, setting, or style, or thatstatements are so varied, distorted or elaborated that the meaning becomes quiteforeign to the original’’ (p 20) For example, in one series a death at the end ofthe story is selected and used to construct a story with a new setting Youngchildren tended to recast the story much earlier than older children Moreover,with regards to the 10-year-old groups, ‘‘the children at the public school (i)recast the story earlier than the children at the private school, and (ii) weremuch more apt to elaborate details and to give stories showing much morediversity of form’’ (p 22) Northway further subsumed other kinds of changesdiscussed by Bartlett (1932) under the label ‘modifications,’ which included: ‘con-ventionalization,’ which is given here the specific meaning of changes towardscommon phraseology; ‘rationalization’ which creates a more reasonable story;

‘reversals’ where phrases are turned into their opposite; and ‘substitution’ ofone reason or activity for another The last three kinds of changes were muchmore common with younger children

Nadel (1937) was an anthropologist that aimed to bring Bartlett’s approach intohis field site in Northern Nigeria He had been working among the Nupe tribe,where he was also brought into close contact with the neighboring Yoruba tribe.Although the two tribes were living in the same environmental conditions withsimilar levels of technology, they had developed entirely different, almost antag-onistic, cultures The Yoruba had an elaborate and rationalized system of deities,each with its specific functions, while Nupe religion centered on an abstract andimpersonal power Yoruba art was characterized by images of a human figure,whereas the Nupe developed ornamental, decorative art This contrast parallelsHaddon’s (1895) description of figurative versus abstract, geometrical designs

(above) Nadel claimed the focus on integrated, concrete meanings among theYoruba and abstract details among the Nupe manifested themselves in everyaspect of each groups’ culture In relation to Bartlett’s (1932) terms a tendencytowards enumerating ‘descriptive details’ becomes linked with the Nupe and mean-ing-oriented ‘rationalization’ with the Yoruba Nadel (1937) does not use the word

‘conventionalization’ but he sets out to study it through a comparison of the twogroup’s recall, finding that the Yoruba do tend to strengthen rational links in thestory while the Yoruba tend to ‘enumerate’ details As with Maxwell (1936) andNorthway (1936), Nadel is careful to argue that while cultural patterns of the twogroups clearly guide recall in a certain direction one cannot ignore the individualvariability within each group Group factors in recall would continue to be ofinterest in the next phase, though more sporadically and less centrally focused

on them

Enter Gestalt psychology

Replications in the 1940s and 50s showed the strong influence of Gestalt ogy While experimental psychologists had previously approached the mind as a set

psychol-of mental elements that are connected through different laws (e.g., psychol-of association),the Gestalt psychologists put emphasis on a person’s total field of experience, aperspective also taken by Bartlett They stressed how a person’s spontaneous orga-nization of the field shaped how objects appear in it, indicating a kind of construc-tion For example, their law of Pragnanz says that mental organization tendstowards regularity, symmetry, and simplicity Wulf (1922/1938) demonstratedthis in a classic memory study Subjects were shown a number of geometricforms and then asked to reproduce them after increasing intervals of time (i.e.,

30 seconds, 24 hours and a week) This study resembles Bartlett’s method ofrepeated reproduction but differs from it in that Wulf used abstract visual materialwithout obvious social content and also provided a small reminder of the stimulusbefore each reproduction Wulf described changes seen in reproductions as

‘‘leveling,’’ where irregularities were smoothed out and ‘‘sharpening,’’ wheresome dominant feature was emphasized Figure 3 illustrates how the zigzag feature

Figure 3 Wulf’s (1922/1938) illustration of sharpening (reproduced from Koffka, 1935,

p 499)