Understanding Schema Theory in Memory Recall

Schema theory Schema’s A concept or framework, built up from experience, about an object, event, person or group. “Cognitive schemas are seen as mental representations that organize our knowledge” Schemata influence the way we interpret, organize, communicate, and remember information. Script’s Scripts are schema about events in time rather than schema for objects. * how to go to dinner in a restaurant * what happens on Christmas day * what makes a romantic date When events don’t follow our scripts, we can become frustrated, angry, disappointed, or simply confused. Definitions of different types of schemas * Scripts – provide information about the sequence of events in particular contexts, e.g., attending class, going to a restaurant * Self-schemas – organizes information we have about ourselves, e.g., strengths, weaknesses and how we feel about them. * Social Schemas – like stereotypes, represent information about groups of people, e.g., Americans, women, accountants.These schemas encompass general knowledge about how people behave in certain social situations within a specific culture. They include expectations, norms, and roles associated with different social contexts Effects of schemas * As active processors of information, humans integrate new information with existing, stored information * Schema theory therefore, predicts that what we already know will influence the outcome of information processing * In other words, new information is processed in the light of existing schema – schema can affect our cognitive processes * These can lead to the modification of memories when recollected. Study 1: War of the Ghosts(1932) Aim(s) * To investigate whether the memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge. * To find out if cultural background and unfamiliarity with a story would lead to distortion of memory when it was recalled. * To test if memory is reconstructive and whether people store and retrieve information per expectations formed by cultural schemas. Procedure Sample: 20 British participants (7 women, 13 men). The participants were not told the aim of the study; they believed they were being tested on the accuracy of recall. Bartlett used repeated reproduction, which is where participants hear a story or see a drawing and are asked to reproduce it after a short time and then to do so again over a period of days, weeks, months or years. The story used was a Native American story called ’The War of the Ghosts’ which was unfamiliar to participants and contained unknown names and concepts. The story content was also unfamiliar. The story was selected because it would test how memory may be reconstructed based on a cultural schema. Each participant read the story to themselves twice. The first reproduction happened 15 minutes later. There was no set interval beyond this and participants recalled the story at further intervals from 20 hours to almost 10 years. Results Bartlett found that participants remembered different parts of the story and that they interpreted the story to fit within their social and cultural expectations, what this means is that the participants changed the facts to” make them fit”. Bartlett called these additions and changes rationalisation. Bartlett made several observations about these transformations 1. They cut the story short it mainly by omissions 2. The phrases used were changed to the language and concepts of the participants and their culture. For example, using the term “boats” rather than “canoe” 3. The recalled version soon became very fixed, though each time it was recalled there were slight variations. Conclusions * Bartlett's study indicates that we don’t remember all the details. Instead, we remember fragments and use our preexisting knowledge (schemas) to fill in the gaps * Remembering is not a passive but rather an active process. * According to Bartlett, humans are constantly in search for meaning- this makes information easier to remember, but may influence the accuracy of the information. * Based on his research Bartlett formulated the theory of reconstructive memory. This means that memories are not copies of experiences but rather a reconstruction. Evaluation:- look in gcse drive for better evaluations * Bartlett’s study wasn't a very well controlled study. Bartlett did not give very specific instructions to his participants. Barlett (1932) wrote, " I thought it best, for these experiments, to try to influence the subject's procedure as little as possible”. * As a result, some distortions observed by Bartlett may have been due to conscious guessing rather than schema-influenced memory. * Gauld and Stephen ( 1967) found that the instructions stressing the need for accurate recall eliminated almost half the errors usually obtained. * There was no control group to see if, for example, other cultures would remember the story different. For example, there was not native American group asked to recall the story. * The story was quasi-experimental. No cause and effect can be established. link: The study represented the schema theory as it found that participants used familiarization which is when we change details in our memory to something more familiar and to us to help them remember and recall the unfamiliar story. This was shown throught partcicpnats changing the word ‘canoe’in the original story and using ‘boat’ when recollecting memory due to their british heritage . This process showed that partcicpants cultural schemas, a stype of social schema, impacted their recall and modified elements of the stroy they were told, proving how schemas influence how we process information. Study 2: Anderson and Pichert Aim: wanted to see if people would remember more details about a story based on their assigned perspective - either a robber or a house buyer. The study indicates that schema may play a role in both the encoding and recall of information. Sample: The sample was made up of 39 introductory educational psychology students. Procedure: The story (see below) had 72 discreet ideas - 15 that were related to burglary and 13 that were related to purchasing a home. The participants were randomly allocated to one of two conditions - the "robber condition" or the "home buyer condition." They were given two minutes to read the story as a prospective burglar or a prospective home buyer. Then they were given 12 minutes to take an 84-item vocabulary test. This was both a distractor task and a control for their language proficiency. They were then asked to "write down as much of the exact story as you can." It was emphasized that they needed to write down every bit of the story that they could remember. When they finished writing, they were given five minutes to do a spatial puzzle test. Then they were asked to recall the story a second time. Half were told to do some from the same perspective that they used in the first recall; half were told to use the other perspective. The researchers found that: * Burglar information was better recalled than homebuyer information. This may be because students do not have a well-developed homebuyer schema. In other words, it is likely that the schema influenced encoding. * The group that had the burglar perspective recalled more burglar information and the group that had the homebuyer perspective recalled more homebuyer information. In other words, it is likely that the schema influenced retrieval. * Participants who changed their perspective recalled an additional 7.1% of the information relevant to their new perspective. The group that did not change perspective recalled 2.9% less information relevant to their perspective. Conclusion: The researchers’ concluded that when we use different perspectives we also use the information from different schema’s to help associate and assimilate relevant pieces of information Evaluation: The experiment is highly controlled and rather artificial. This means that it has high internal validity and low ecological validity, as the people are not often asked to switch perspectives and carry out controlled tasks when buying houses or robberies in ral life and therefore may make some of the results harder to relate to the real day to day life of people when they may use different schemas consistently in different situations. It is possible that the participants understood the hypothesis of the study and engaged in the expectancy effect - that is, it is possible that when asked to redo the task from the other perspective, they did not write down details from the first recall of the story because they did not think that they were relevant. This means we do not know if they were forgotten or simply excluded. Order effects could also play a role. A greater period of time between the two recall conditions may have led to different findings. In addition, fatigue effects may have played a role in the amount of detail recalled. It is assumed that the homebuyer details were recalled less frequently because students do not have the schema for home buying as they do for burglaries. It could be, however, that the story was written in such a way that the burglary ideas were more engaging than the homebuyer details - and this could be the reason for the higher recall rates. Link: The study supports the schema theory as it found that when participants used different perspectives, they used only remembered the pieces of information most relevant to their role. This meant that as particicpnats changed perspectives they effectively selected different schema’s that they were using which directly impacted the pieces of information they remembered and were able to recall. LAQ Theory → derfinitions → types of schemas → how they influence the cognitive process of memory → why they are important to study Topic sentence 1: one way in which schemas can be explored is through their links with perspective. It is believed that when we use different perspectives we also use different schemas to remember inf9rmation which can filter and limit what we recall/retrieve of the nee information we receive → study 1: Anderson and Pichert → the study shows how schemas have practical application in scenarios such as homebuying and allows us to consider the importance of perspective when tyring to remember new information → furthermore, it highlights how schemas can influence the way we may interpret scenarios and how this may impact what we remember → however, the study used university student, who may have has underdevelop schemas regarding homebuying which may mean that the results may not be valid , and ,may lack generalizability to people of different ages with different schemas → this highlights the low constrict validity and testability of the schemas theory , as it is not a tangible variable which can be directly manipulated but rather only can be studied through its effects on our behaviour → study evaluation Topic sentence 2: Another way in which schema theory’s effects on our recall/memeory can be seen is through how they can manipulate our recall of stories and events. Study 2: War of the Ghosts → allows us to see how cultural schemas(a form of social schemas) affect the pieces of information we remember, and how we recall them. Seemingly leading to ommissions and familiarization details → allows us to see how they influence our memory through recall and its accuracy. → however, results may be influenced by researcher bias, meaning that the relations identified are not as accurately seen in real life/ valid in real-life situations. → study evaluation

Script’s 
	Scripts are schema about events in time rather than schema for objects. 
* how to go to dinner in a restaurant
* what happens on Christmas day
* what makes a romantic date
When events don’t follow our scripts, we can become frustrated, angry, disappointed, or simply confused.

Definitions of different types of schemas 
	   * Scripts – provide information about the sequence of events in particular contexts, e.g., attending class, going to a restaurant

* Self-schemas – organizes information we have about ourselves, e.g., strengths, weaknesses and how we feel about them.

* Social Schemas – like stereotypes, represent information about groups of people, e.g., Americans, women, accountants.These schemas encompass general knowledge about how people behave in certain social situations within a specific culture. They include expectations, norms, and roles associated with different social contexts

Effects of schemas
	   * As active processors of information, humans integrate new information with existing, stored information
   * Schema theory therefore, predicts that what we already know will influence the outcome of information processing
   * In other words, new information is processed in the light of existing schema – schema can affect our cognitive processes
   * These can lead to the modification of memories when recollected. 
	Study 1: War of the Ghosts(1932)
	Aim(s)
   * To investigate whether the memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge.
   * To find out if cultural background and unfamiliarity with a story would lead to distortion of memory when it was recalled.
   * To test if memory is reconstructive and whether people store and retrieve information per expectations formed by cultural schemas.

Procedure
Sample: 20 British participants (7 women, 13 men). The participants were not told the aim of the study; they believed they were being tested on the accuracy of recall.

Bartlett used repeated reproduction, which is where participants hear a story or see a drawing and are asked to reproduce it after a short time and then to do so again over a period of days, weeks, months or years.

The story used was a Native American story called ’The War of the Ghosts’ which was unfamiliar to participants and contained unknown names and concepts. The story content was also unfamiliar. The story was selected because it would test how memory may be reconstructed based on a cultural schema.

Each participant read the story to themselves twice. The first reproduction happened 15 minutes later. There was no set interval beyond this and participants recalled the story at further intervals from 20 hours to almost 10 years.

Results
Bartlett found that participants remembered different parts of the story and that they interpreted the story to fit within their social and cultural expectations, what this means is that the participants changed the facts to” make them fit”. Bartlett called these additions and changes rationalisation.

Bartlett made several observations about these transformations 
   1. They cut the story short it mainly by omissions 
   2. The phrases used were changed to  the language and concepts of the participants and their culture. For example, using the term “boats” rather than “canoe”
   3. The recalled version soon became very fixed, though each time it was recalled there were slight variations.

Conclusions
   * Bartlett's study indicates that we don’t remember all the details.  Instead, we remember fragments and use our preexisting knowledge (schemas) to fill in the gaps
   * Remembering is not a passive but rather an active process. 
   * According to Bartlett, humans are constantly in search for meaning- this makes information easier to remember, but may influence the accuracy of the information.
   * Based on his research Bartlett formulated the theory of reconstructive memory. This means that memories are not copies of experiences but rather a reconstruction.
	Evaluation:- look in gcse drive for better evaluations 
	   * Bartlett’s study wasn't a very well controlled study. Bartlett did not give very specific instructions to his participants.  Barlett (1932) wrote,  " I thought it best, for these experiments, to try to influence the subject's procedure as little as possible”.
   * As a result, some distortions observed by Bartlett may have been due to conscious guessing rather than schema-influenced memory.
   * Gauld and Stephen ( 1967) found that the instructions stressing the need for accurate recall eliminated almost half the errors usually obtained.
   * There was no control group to see if, for example, other cultures would remember the story different.  For example, there was not native American group asked to recall the story.
   * The story was quasi-experimental.  No cause and effect can be established.

link:
	The study represented the schema theory as it found that participants used familiarization which is when we change details in our memory to something more familiar and  to us to help them remember and recall the unfamiliar story. This was shown throught partcicpnats changing the word ‘canoe’in the original story and using ‘boat’ when recollecting memory due to their british heritage . This process showed that partcicpants cultural schemas, a stype of social schema, impacted their recall and modified elements of the stroy they were told, proving how schemas influence how we process information. 
	Study 2: Anderson and Pichert
	Aim: 
wanted to see if people would remember more details about a story based on their assigned perspective - either a robber or a house buyer. The study indicates that schema may play a role in both the encoding and recall of information.

Sample: The sample was made up of 39 introductory educational psychology students.

Procedure: 
The story (see below) had 72 discreet ideas - 15 that were related to burglary and 13 that were related to purchasing a home. The participants were randomly allocated to one of two conditions - the "robber condition" or the "home buyer condition."
They were given two minutes to read the story as a prospective burglar or a prospective home buyer. Then they were given 12 minutes to take an 84-item vocabulary test.  This was both a distractor task and a control for their language proficiency. They were then asked to "write down as much of the exact story as you can." It was emphasized that they needed to write down every bit of the story that they could remember.
When they finished writing, they were given five minutes to do a spatial puzzle test. Then they were asked to recall the story a second time.  Half were told to do some from the same perspective that they used in the first recall; half were told to use the other perspective.
The researchers found that:
   * Burglar information was better recalled than homebuyer information.  This may be because students do not have a well-developed homebuyer schema. In other words, it is likely that the schema influenced encoding.
   * The group that had the burglar perspective recalled more burglar information and the group that had the homebuyer perspective recalled more homebuyer information. In other words, it is likely that the schema influenced retrieval.
   * Participants who changed their perspective recalled an additional 7.1% of the information relevant to their new perspective. The group that did not change perspective recalled 2.9% less information relevant to their perspective.
Conclusion: 
The researchers’ concluded that when we use different perspectives we also use the information from different schema’s to help associate and assimilate relevant pieces of information

Evaluation: 
	The experiment is highly controlled and rather artificial.  This means that it has high internal validity and low ecological validity, as the people are not often asked to switch perspectives and carry out controlled tasks when buying houses or robberies in ral life and therefore may make some of the results harder to relate to the real day to day life of people when they may use different schemas consistently in different situations. 
It is possible that the participants understood the hypothesis of the study and engaged in the expectancy effect - that is, it is possible that when asked to redo the task from the other perspective, they did not write down details from the first recall of the story because they did not think that they were relevant.  This means we do not know if they were forgotten or simply excluded.
Order effects could also play a role. A greater period of time between the two recall conditions may have led to different findings.  In addition, fatigue effects may have played a role in the amount of detail recalled.
It is assumed that the homebuyer details were recalled less frequently because students do not have the schema for home buying as they do for burglaries.  It could be, however, that the story was written in such a way that the burglary ideas were more engaging than the homebuyer details - and this could be the reason for the higher recall rates.

Link: 
	The study supports the schema theory as it found that when participants used different perspectives, they used only remembered the pieces of information most relevant to their role. This meant that as particicpnats changed perspectives they effectively selected different schema’s that they were using which directly impacted the pieces of information they remembered and were able to recall. 
	LAQ
	Theory
→ derfinitions
→ types of schemas
→ how they influence the cognitive process of memory 
→ why they are important to study

Topic sentence 1: one way in which schemas can be explored is through their links with perspective. It is believed that when we use different perspectives we also use different schemas to remember inf9rmation which can filter and limit what we recall/retrieve of the nee information we receive 
→ study 1: Anderson and Pichert
→ the study shows how schemas have practical application in scenarios such as homebuying and allows us to consider the importance of perspective when tyring to remember new information 
→ furthermore, it highlights how schemas can influence the way we may interpret scenarios and how this may impact what we remember
→ however, the study used university student, who may have has underdevelop schemas regarding homebuying which may mean that the results may not be valid , and ,may lack generalizability to people of different ages with different schemas
→ this highlights the low constrict validity and testability of the schemas theory , as it is not a tangible variable which can be directly manipulated but rather only can be studied through its effects on our behaviour
→ study evaluation

Topic sentence 2: Another way in which schema theory’s effects on our recall/memeory can be seen is through how they can manipulate our recall of stories and events.

Study 2: War of the Ghosts
→ allows us to see how cultural schemas(a form of social schemas) affect the pieces of information we remember, and how we recall them. Seemingly leading to ommissions and familiarization details
→ allows us to see how they influence our memory through recall and its accuracy.
→ however, results may be influenced by researcher bias, meaning that the relations identified are not as accurately seen in real life/ valid in real-life situations.
→ study evaluation

Transcript for:Understanding Schema Theory in Memory Recall

Transcript for:
Understanding Schema Theory in Memory Recall