Wes Bousfield died September 6, 1986, in Connecticut, where he had lived and worked for almost 50 years. He was born on April 22, 1904, in Sao Ching, China, to a medical missionary family, and his early education occurred there. In the 1960s, his knowledge of Chinese enabled him to help interested students with the interpretation of the I Ching, and all his life he maintained his skill in the art of paper folding, which he had learned in his boyhood.

Bousfield attended college in New England, earning a BME degree at Northeastern University in 1927, two master's degrees (Boston University, 1928, and Harvard University, 1932), and a PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1933. Among his graduate student colleagues at Harvard were B. F. Skinner and Fred S. Keller. Bousfield's first position was as an instructor at Tufts College from 1929 to 1939. In the latter year, he moved to the University of Connecticut as department head, rising through the ranks to professor and finally retirement as a professor emeritus in 1971. On his appointment in 1939, he headed a department of perhaps four people that in 1960, at his stepping down from the headship, had quadrupled in size and had developed a number of doctoral programs, starting in 1949.

Bousfield's publication record began in 1930, and he published almost 40 articles alone or with collaborators at Tufts and Connecticut up to 1953. These studies concerned a number of topics: apparatus, fatigue and motor skills, hunger (in rats, rabbits, chickens, and cats), and affective processes (especially euphoria, primarily by means of written responses to instructions such as "name as many pleasant things as you can" and by rating scales). He found good support for the proposition that more responses occurred for pleasant things than for unpleasant ones. This work led to studies of restricted associations (list all of the makes of automobiles or names of cities, etc., that one could write in a fixed time period). He described the response sequences obtained by an exponential equation involving rate of response and the pool of available responses. In a study of restricted associations, reported in 1944, he noted the occurrence of clusters of closely related items among those produced. For example, for names of birds, hawk, eagle, and vulture would occur together, as would chicken, turkey, duck, and goose; further, within each set the items occurred in rapid succession. This finding underlay Bousfield's method of studying clustering in the recall of items belonging to mutually exclusive categories, presented once in a random order; it was introduced at an American Psychological Association (APA) symposium in 1951 and in print in 1953. The next 25 years of Bousfield's career were essentially devoted to the study of organization in memory through category clustering in free recall. His numerous publications after 1953 involved this topic.

Although Wes's modesty would have prevented his acknowledgment of the fact, this method for studying organization in memory represented a breakthrough that had great importance to the study of hierarchical coding processes in memory. Wes initially gave the phenomenon of augmented recall for categorically related items an interpretation in terms of habit strength of the words (probably based on their frequencies of usage) and a "relatedness increment" that an item adds to others to which it is related (I.e., that belong to the same category). Following D. O. Hebb, Bousfield assumed that production of a word activates its superordinate system, which then facilitates the subordinate word habits. He saw the sequence of items as reflecting the relative strengths of habit and relatedness increment at any given time. Under the influence of burgeoning work on word-association, Bousfield eventually dropped the emphasis on superordinates and relied on the amount of associative overlap in sets of related words. Throughout all his work, Bousfield operated with methodological rigor and with attention to mathematical descriptions and statistical calculations. (In some of the latter, he obtained assistance from his son, Aldridge K., a mathematician.)

Bousfield served in other ways. He was Treasurer of the Eastern Psychological Association (EPA) from 1948 to 1950, and he was the first archivist of the invisible college known as the Group for the Study of Verbal Behavior (GSVB). This was an informal organization, dedicated to exchanging preprints and offprints among what became over time a substantial mailing list.

At the time of Wes's retirement from teaching in 1971, a symposium in his honor was held at the meeting in New York City of the EPA. The symposium concerned his contributions to the study of organization and memory and included papers by James Deese and James J. Jenkins, co-workers for many years, the late C. Richard Puff, a former student, and Max Allen, a Connecticut colleague. The large attendance at that meeting indicates the esteem in which Wes was held and the interest in his work.

Charles N. Cofer
University of North Carolina

Aschcraft, Mark H. (2002). Cognition (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall; pp. 222-224

Organization in Storage

The earliest program of research on organization (or clustering) was conducted by Bousfield. In his earliest study (Bousfield & Sedgewick, 1944), Bousfield asked subjects to name, for example, as many birds as they could. The intriguing result was that the subjects tended to name the words in subgroups, such as "robin, bluejay, sparrow -- chicken, duck, goose -- eagle, hawk." To investigate this further, Bousfield (1953) gave subjects a 60-item list to be learned for free recall. Unlike other work at that time, however, Bousfield used related words for his lists, 15 words each from the categories animals, personal names, vegetables, and professions. Although the words were presented in a randomized order, the subjects tended to recall them by category; for instance, "dog, cat, cow, pea, bean, John, Bob." Bousfield's modest interpretation of this pattern of recall was that the greater-than-chance grouping of items into clusters "implies the operation of an organizing tendency" (p. 237).

Where did this "organizing tendency" come from? Not from the words themselves, to be sure -- it would be foolish to say that the words exerted the tendency to organize themselves. No, the tendency was in the participants, in their unseen mental activities that went on during the learning of the list. Obviously, the participants noticed at some point during input that several words were drawn from the same categories. From that point on, they used the reasonable strategy of grouping the items together on the basis of category membership (there is a nice metamemory effect here as well). This implies that subjects were reorganizing the list as it was presented, by means of rehearsal. The consequence of this reorganization during storage was straightforward: The way the material had been stored governed the way it was recalled.

Investigations of category clustering became very common after Bousfield's initial reports for several important reasons. A widely shared viewpoint, expressed neatly by Mandler (1967, p. 328), was that "memory and organization are not only correlated, but organization is a necessary condition for memory." In this view, any information that was stored in memory was organized, almost by definition. Furthermore, standard storage strategies, most prominently rehearsal, came to be viewed as organizational devices with the consequence that anything rehearsed was also organized (at least, anything rehearsed elaboratively). In this view, mnemonic devices were no different; for instance, "all organizations are mnemonic devices" (Mandler, 1967, p. 329), and likewise, all mnemonic devices provide organization... Indeed, the clustering research, with its focus on how word meaning affects recall, was probably the most important experimental bridge to studies of long-term semantic memory.

Bousfield, W. A. (1953). The occurrence of clustering in the recall of randomly arranged associates. Journal of General Psychology, 49, 229-240.
Bousfield, W. A., & Sedgewick, C. H. W. (1944). An analysis of sequences of restricted associative responses. Journal of General Psychology, 30, 149-165.
Mandler, G. (1967). Organization and memory. In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 1, pp. 327-372). New York: Academic Press.