Bartlett’s concept of schema in reconstruction

Brady WagonerAalborg University

From storage to action

• Memory is not a substance, but rather an activity taking place at the intersection between an organism and its environment

• Holistic research methodology using narratives and images, as natural settings as possible, and analysis of qualitative changes in successive reproductions.

• Develops theory of remembering as a constructive generalization contra the idea of memory storage.

Henry Head

Henry Head

• Worked with brain damaged patients from WWI• Some had lost the ability to register changes in

body position, but mental imagery was intact. • Others suffered from a phantom limb• Posits ‘schema’ as “combined standard against

which all subsequent changes in posture are registered before they enter consciousness”

• Schema extends to anything contributing to body movement –e.g., a cane or car.

Bartlett’s objections

1) Head’s phrase “storehouse of ideas” is misplaced (as it suggests the storage metaphor).

2) No strict separation between consciousness and unconsciousness.

3) “I strongly dislike the term ‘schema’.” He prefers “active developing patterns” or better “organized settings”.

Bartlett’s definition

“‘Schema’ refers to an active organization of past reactions, or of past experiences... a particular response is possible only because it is related to other similar responses which have been serially organised, yet which operate, not simply as individual members coming one after another, but as a unitary mass.”Schema “are actively doing something all the time”

‘Turning around on ones schema’

• Implies rupture in flow of embodied action in the environment, such as when a mental image appears.

• The past is made “objects of his reaction”• Self-conscious control of action: schemata are

“not merely something that works the organism, but something that the organism can work” (p. 208)

Reconstructing Schema Phase 1 (1930s – 1960s)

Northway’s (1940) Reconstruction• SCHEMA are: “what the subject makes (creates or

develops) from the given material (or situation)” (cf. Bartlett’s “effort after meaning”)

• School children learned a text by one of THREE DIFFERENT LEARNING METHODS (e.g., Repetition vs. Project method)

• SCHEMATIC DIFFERENCES are revealed not in quantitative scores but in children’s ability to flexibly transform material into new forms.

Comparison with Bartlett• Learning and remembering are ongoing

activities.

• Focus on qualitative changes

• Explores schema as a flexible adaptation to the environment (rather than imposing accuracy imperative)

Reconstructing Schema Phase II (1960s -1980s)

Cognitive Psychology

• Explosions of schema theories and its derivatives, such as “scripts” and “frames”

• Neisser (1967): ‘a nonspecific but organized representation of prior experience’.

• Schmidt (1975): ‘Abstract representations of knowledge about actions.’

• Rumelhart (1980): ‘a data structure for representing the generic concepts stored in memory’ (p. 34)

Associative networks

Scripts

Mandler’s (1984) idealized story grammar

Mandler and Johnson’s (1977) War of the Ghosts story schema

Comparison with Bartlett

• Static structure (no development)• Focused on elements or nodes (not holistic)• Seen to be in the mind/brain, i.e. structural

(not functional, embodied)• No notion of “turning around on ones own

schema”

Reconstructing Schema Phase 3 (1990s -2000s)

Mori’s re-embodiment of schema

Participants 1 Participant 2

Stage 1Navigation

Navigation of University A

Navigation of University B

Stage 2(a month later)

Participants exchange their navigation experience each other

Stage 3(two weeks later)

‘Interrogator’ asks questions about participants navigation experience of university A and B

Mori’s re-embodiment of schema

…indicates different ‘organization of schema’

Comparison with Bartlett

• Explores both personal AND social aspects of remembering.

• Emphasizes the body, temporality and social context.

• Innovation: modeling social context, and capturing the experiential qualities of coming into bodily contact with an environment through narrative

Summary

• Schema was originally developed as an alternative to the trace theory of memory

• It was embodied, dynamic, temporal and holistic

• In time the concept was transformed into the opposite of this

• However, methodologies sensitive to qualitative differences in schematic organization are being developed

Thank you!!!