The 26th Bartlett Memorial Lecture from Truths of Bartlett to Illusions of Vision

Abstract

This is an informal account of Sir Frederic Bartlett's department at the time I was a student and started research in the late 1940s and 1950s, developing some themes of his influence and how his ideas, with Craik's, have had a major effect on experimental psychology ever since. As one of the diminishing tribe of those who knew “Sir Fred”, it seems appropriate to make this quite a personal statement, representative of his influence on us, rather than a formal paper. His interests were very great, including not only memory, but thinking and social issues largely based on anthropology, as well as practical problems of selection for skill, and design of machines to be appropriate for humans. A “subliminal” theme is errors of perception. It is this that will be developed here as, following his influence as my teacher, this has been the central interest of my work, which took off from the Cambridge Psychology Department of that time.