The Constructive Mind Bartlett's Psychology in Reconstruction [Hardcover]

An integrative study of Frederic Bartlett's work and legacy, describing his fundamental ideas of constructive remembering, schema and cultural dynamics.The Constructive Mind presents the life, work and legacy of Frederic Bartlett (18861969), one of the leading psychologists of the twentieth century. Wagoner describes Bartlett's fundamental ideas - such as constructive remembering, imagining, thinking, schema and cultural dynamics - and how these have developed from Bartlett's time until today.The Constructive Mind presents the life, work and legacy of Frederic Bartlett (18861969), one of the leading psychologists of the twentieth century. Wagoner describes Bartlett's fundamental ideas - such as constructive remembering, imagining, thinking, schema and cultural dynamics - and how these have developed from Bartlett's time until today.The Constructive Mind is an integrative study of the psychologist Frederic Bartlett's (18861969) life, work and legacy. Bartlett is most famous for the idea that remembering is constructive and for the concept of schema; for him, 'constructive' meant that human beings are future-oriented and flexibly adaptive to new circumstances. This book shows how his notion of construction is also central to understanding social psychology and cultural dynamics, as well as other psychological processes such as perceiving, imagining and thinking. Wagoner contextualises the development of Bartlett's key ideas in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries. Furthermore, he applies Bartlett's constructive analysis of cultural transmission in order to chart how his ideas were appropriated and transformed by others that followed. As such this book can also be read as a case study in the continuous reconstruction of ideas in science.Foreword; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The life and work of a Cambridge psychologist; 2. Experiments in psychology; 3. Cultural diffusion and reconstruction; 4. The concept of schema in reconstruction; 5. The social plÄ