Chapter 3: Schema Theory Flashcards
Types of schema
Schemas are mental representations that organize our knowledge, beliefs, and expectations. They are derived from prior experience and influence memory at all stages.
Social schemas: schemas about groups of people, e.g. stereotypes
Scripts: schemas about sequences of events, a pattern of behavior
Self-schemas: schemas about ourselves
Bottom up vs top down
top-down processing is with schema, bottom-down information is building knowledge without a schema.
Bransford and Johnson (1972)
A: investigate effect of context on comprehension and memory of text passages
M: Independent measures design with 5 participant groups
P: All participants in all groups heard a similar tape-recorded passage. After hearing it, participants were asked to recall it as accurately as possible, and or write down as many ideas as possible in seven minutes time. The five conditions were:
- No context: heard once
- No context: heard twice
- Context before: participants were given a picture before related to the extract
- Context after: same picture, after hearing
- Partial context: picture provided before passage but with objects arranged differently.
R: Results showed that 1,2,3 and 4 had roughly the same amount of idea units stored but 3 had more than double.
C: It was concluded that showing context before created a mental representation (a schema), which organized how the knowledge was stored whilst the participants were hearing the extract.
Anderson and Pichert (1978)
A: demonstrate schema’s effect on retrieval of memories from LTM.
M: Participants are assigned into four groups, independent measures
P: Participants are assigned a homebuyer or burglar perspective. Participants are given a text with 73 ideas to read within 2 minutes, followed by a 12-minute verbal filler task. Afterwards, participants recalled as much of the story as possible, followed by 5 more minutes of filler. Participants are required to either keep or change perspective (homebuyer or burglar) and then recall the text again.
R: First recall burglars remembered more information relevant to their role and vice versa for home buyers. Participants that changed perspective recalled 7.1% more of the now important information, and the subjects who did not change recalled 2.9% of the still unimportant information. Whichever schema applied resulted in more information fitting that schema being recalled.
C: All knowledge is actively processed through preexisting schemas. They continually act at the stage of encoding, while storing and while retrieving with a significant effect. [influence our retrieval]
E: The mild deception in this example led to absolutely no physical nor mental discomfort or harm for the participants, hence it can be argued that it is justified. The deception did not result in the participants doing something they did not want to do.
Brewer and Treyens (1981)
A: Investigate role of schema in the encoding and retrieval of memory.
M: Independent measures
P: Participants were seated in a room replicating an office. They were asked to wait by a professor who said that they were making sure that the other participant had finished the experiment; the experiment had initiated without the participant knowing. Only one chair was not occupied by other objects, this way it secured that all participants had the same vantage point. After 35 seconds, participants were called into another room and asked to recall the objects from the office. Participants were in three conditions:
The recall condition - First they were asked to recall as many objects and their location and colour as possible, and then they were given a questionnaire with 131 objects where they had to rate from 1 to 6 how sure they were that it was in the room. 61 were 70 were not.
Drawing condition: draw as much as they could remember
Verbal recognition: participants were read a list and asked whether they were in the room or not.
R: expected items were more likely to be remembered compared to non-typical items for an office when drawing or writing down. When given information from a list, incongruent items were recalled (like a skull). Some items were morphed in their mind to fit with the classic office schema (trapezoidal worktable was recalled as square).
C: Participants would either notice something that fit very well in their schema while directly recalling, but when reminded about incongruent objects they remembered them vividly because they stood out compared to their schemas.
E: There is a question of deceit here: the participants were not given all the information.
Darley and Gross (1983)
Darley and Gross (1983) showed the effects of social schemas on our perception and interpretations. In the study, participants where either led to believe that a girl was from a high socioeconomic status or a low socio-economic status. The participants from the two groups were then to rate the girl’s academic performance while she was taking a test. Those who believed she came from an SES rated her academic performance much higher than those who were told the opposite.
Bower, Black and Turner (1979)
Bower, Black, and Turner (1979) showed how scripts stored in our memory help us make sense of sequential data. The aim of the study was to see if in recalling a text, subjects would use the underlying script to fill in gaps of actions not explicitly mentioned in the text. After filler tasks, participants were asked to recall as much of a text as possible. The participants were prone to filling in the gaps; that they encode the text based on the underlying script, that is, we remember the generalized idea behind a text rather than the text itself.
Bugelski and Alampay (1961)
The Rat Man of Bugelski and Alampay (1961). Participants in this study saw an ambiguous picture after being exposed to a series of drawings of either animals or faces. In the first condition, participants were more likely to interpret the ambiguous stimulus as a rat; in the second condition, they were more likely to see a man wearing glasses. After viewing a series of drawings they had an implicit expectation that influenced their perception of reality.
