Anderson and Pichert (1978

Question 1

Aim

Answer 1

To investigate if schema processing influences encoding and retrival

Question 2

Procedure

Answer 2

Participants were given a story about two young boys who skipped school to go to one of their houses. The house was described as having a leaky roof, isolated in an attractive neighborhood, always empty on Thursdays, had a damp basement and contained a bike, tv and expensive coin collection. The participants were split into two groups. One group was asked to look at the house in the perspective of a realtor, while the other group was asked to look at it as a thief. After reading, the participants were given a distraction task for 12 minutes before they were asked to recall the story. After recalling the story from their assigned schema, they were distracted for another 5 minutes before they had to recall the story again, but from the opposite schema.

Question 3

Results

Answer 3

For the first recall, participants with the burglar schema recalled more information about what a burglar would look for, while the participants with the realtor’s schema recalled more information of the homebuyers.
For the participants that changed schemas recalled 7.1% of now important information that was not recalled in the first trial. Participants who did not change schemas recalled a 2.9% less of the still unimportant information.

Question 4

Findings

Answer 4

The new schema could only affect recall at the retrieval stage, so schema must have an effect on both the encoding and retrieval stages. Participants also encoded facts irrelevant to their specific schema. This shows we encode all information, even information not relevant to the schema just in case.