Frederic C Bartlett
Bartlett, a psychologist in Britain, introduced the notion of schemas to describe the memory system as the formation of abstract cognitive structures. Bartlett stated that memory was an imaginative construction or reconstruction that closely related to past experience and present attitude. He did many experiments to explore memory from cognitive perspective. Through these experiments came his theory of reproduction. As a story was reproduced from one person to the other, the listener's brain processed content rather than wording so that verbtim memory was hardly to be expected. The reproducer digested the material, abstracted its important characteristics which corresponded to his unique background and his momentary attitude. After constructing or interpreting, he would organize these characteristics into a rational arrangement, then arrange the features coherently and finally produce the reconstruction. The result of his experiements intimated that cultural background and social conditions dominated the process of memory.
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http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~elsemore/Project/pages/bartlett.html