New vistas in the study of memory

Abstract

This book presents important new findings and new ideas about remembering: what people remember, why they remember it, and how we might best describe the processes involved. These issues have been considered before, most notably by Sir Frederick Bartlett in the 1932 book from which our title is derived. Arguing that standard laboratory methods did not do justice to what he called the subject's “effort after meaning,” Bartlett introduced both new procedures (recall of meaningful stories) and new theoretical concepts (e.g., “schema”) into the study of memory. Although the influence of his work was slow to develop at first, its importance is now widely acknowledged: Story recall has become a standard laboratory technique, and “schema” a standard theoretical idea. No longer revolutionary, Bartlett's insights have been effectively assimilated into the traditional psychology of memory.