“Russian Scandals”: Soviet Readings of American Cybernetics in the Early Years of the Cold War

In May 1913 a young British psychologist named Frederic Bartlett participated in a series of experiments on visual perception in the newly opened Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University. “I was fascinated,” he wrote, “by the variety of interpretations which different people then achieved, all of which they said they ‘saw,’ of the same diagrams and pictures” shown to them by the experimentalist. Dissatisfied with the accepted “exact” experimental technique, which relied on recollection of lists of nonsense syllables, Bartlett was looking for a new method of studying human memory. He was convinced that memory was a social and cultural phenomenon and wanted cultural associations and behavioral patterns to play a role in the experiment. At that moment, he met Norbert Wiener, a fresh eighteen-year-old Ph.D. from Harvard, who arrived in Cambridge to study mathematical logic with Bertrand Russell. Later Bartlett recalled: