CLOA Studies Flashcards
Bartlett 1932
Schemas
Schemas and The war of the ghosts: old native american folk story. Two conditions: serial reproduction (rik. Puhelin) and repeated reproduction (same people reproduce story after dif. Intervals)
Results: stories shortened. Schemas changed foreign things to familiar.
Evaluation: old, vague, no standard instructions.
Brewer and Treyens (1981)
Schemas
Investigate whether existing schemas on objects in a room (office) affect the memory.
30 uni student were taken to wait in an office room. There were normal objects (desk, type-writer) and abnormal (skull)
They had to recall objects afterwards.
Most recalled schematic objects (deks etc) some recalled things that would be expected in an office. Many recalled skull because not expected.
Evaluation:
Artificiality. Confirms schema theory. Deception. Sample bias.
Bransford and Johnson 1972
Schemas
Participants were read a rather long text.
First group were told that the text was about washing clothers. Title before condition.
Second group was told after. Title after condition.
Third group wasn’t told at all. No title condition.
The participants had to recall as many things as possible from the text.
Results:
Title before: remembered 5.8/18
Title after: 2.6/18
no title: 2.8/18
The results show that those who activated their schemas on washing clothes could use them when recalling the text.
In the title after condition the information came too late to help.
Loftus and Palmer 1974
Reliability of memory and schemas
Peterson and Peterson 1959
Multistore model of memory:
Participants had to remember consonant triplets.
They were presented one at a time and had to be remembered after an interval during which the participants had to count backwards from a number.
The intervals were 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 seconds.
Then they had to recall the triplets.
After 3 seconds interval the participants could remember around 80% of the triplets.
After 18 seconds, only 10%.
This shows that rehearsal is important in moving the memory from STS to LTS.
Glanzer and Cunitz 1966
Multistore model of memory:
Free recall and immediate and delayed free recall.
Participants were presented 15 words they knew they had to memorize.
Half of the participants recalled words immediately after seeing them. This was the immediate free recall condition (IFR)
Half recalled after a distraction task of 30 seconds (DFR) where they counted backwards in threes from a three-digit number.
The results showed the primacy and recency effects and created a serial position curve.
There was was a recency and primacy effect in IFR because the words were still in STS and they were still remembered, and the first words were rehearsed.
There was only primacy effect in DFR because those words were rehearsed during the task.
The results created a serial position curve.
Craik and Tulving 1975
Levels of processing:
participants shown words and asked to answer questions that require either
structural
phonological
semantic processing.
They remembered the semantic significantly better.
Tyler 1979
Levels of processing:
anagrams with different difficulty level.
Those that were harder and required more semantic processing were remembered better.
Loftus and Palmer 1974 A
Reliability of memory.
Schemas and eyewitness testimony.
Students were shown film of a car accident and asked questions about it later.
The critical question was How fast the cars were going when they hit each other? the word hit was replaced with different verbs, such as contacted, bumped, and smashed into.
The results show that the participants in the contacted condition averaged a 31.8 mph estimate.
In smashed into the estimate was 40.8mph
This shows that schemas were activated when hearing a word and it affected the memory of the situation.
The question became a leading question that influenced the answers. This is dangerous in court cases.
Evaluation:
Lack of ecological validity, very different from an actual accident setting. Also, student are not generalizable for everyone.
Loftus and Palmer 1974 B
Reliability of memory
In a follow-up experiment students were shown a video of a car accident and asked questions.
Critical question about speed.
Two conditions, smashed or hit. A control condition were no question about speed.
A week later the participants were asked if there was any broken glass in the video. There was no.
32% in the smashed condition said yes. Only 14% in the hit condition said yes. In control, 12% said yes.
This shows that the schemas of a serious accident and broken glass were activated when hearing smashed. This affected the memory.
Loftus et al 1987
Reliability of memory:
The weapon effect
Participants heard a discussion from another room.
First condition: man with greasy hands and holding a pen came out.
Second: Man with a paper knife and bloody hands came out.
When asked to identify the man from 50 photographs, the participants who were in first condition were more accurate.
The study shows that the weapon drew the attention of the participants. This was supported by analysis of the participants eye movements.
High stress situations seem to make the reliability even worse.
Scoville and Milner 1957
The case study of H.M.
Injured head as a 7 year old. Began epileptic seizures at 10. At 27 epliepsy preveneted normal life.
Scoville performed a surgery, where medial temporal lobes were removed.
At the time 1957 it was not known how their removal will affect memory.
More was removed that was intended: his hippocampus was removed.
MRI scan in 1996 showed that extensive damage was done to his brain caused by epilepsy medication.
His problems:
Inability to create long term memories.
Could hold information in working memory, but when distracted he forgot.
He could remember some things from his childhood, but very little from 11 year prior to surgery.
This is known as retrograde amnesia: no memory of things before an event. He couldn’t detect the passing of time.
H.M also had anterograde amnesia: the inability to form new memories. He did however have some idea who Elvis Presley and J.F. Kennedy were.
He was good natured, which might be caused by medication or damage.
He couldn’t move things to LTS. He could move some procedural memories to LTS. He was able to talk, but forgot what the discussion was about immediately.
Cole and Scribner 1974
Cultural and social factors on memory
Cross-cultural study on memory. School children in the USA and the Kpelle people in Liberia were asked to recall objects that were presented to them.
The objects were made differently so they are familiar to each culture. First part was free recall:
Kpelle students without schooling didn’t improve after the age of ten. Schooled students in USA and LIberia did as well.
In second part the words were part of a story.
Here Liberian non-schooled children did well, they grouped them according to the roles they played in the story.
Illiterate children didn’t use chunking, or use rehearsal, as the position of the word on the list didn’t have an effect on the remembering.
Schooled children used categorization.
Evaluation:
Unclear what is cultural and what is caused by education.
Speisman et al. 1964
Cognitive factors and biological factors interaction in emotion.
How does the manipulation of cognitive appraisal affect the emotional response?
Laboratory. Participants were shown stress-evoking films. One of them showed an aboriginal initiating ceremony with genetal cutting.
There were three conditions:
Trauma condition, where music concentrated on the pain and mutilation.
Intellectualization condition, where music concentrated on the anthropological aspect
Denial condition, where the boys were shown to be happy.
Physiologicl measures of participants were taken, such as galvanic skin response and heart rate.
Those in trauma condition showed much more stress response.
The study supports appraisal theory as it seems that the participants cognition was in charge of the emotion.
lacks ecological validity.
Schachter and Singer 1962
Physiology and cognition in emotion.
Adrenaline cause emotion, but the nature of it depends on contextual factors, they thought.
Same emotions have same physiological effects. Mind labels them to specific emotions.
184 male participants told they would get vitamin injections.
actually, three groups got adrenaline and one group got placebo.
First of the three groups were informed about the actual side effects of adrenaline injections, such as increased heart rate and shaky hands.
The second group was informed about fake effects, such as headache and itchiness.
The third group were not informed about side effects.
There were two situations where the participants were put into:
euphoria, where they played in the office.
Anger, where a confederate filled a questionnaire near them and got increasingly angry.
The participants were observed and afterwards they answered a questionnaire.
The results showed that those who didn’t know the actual side effect were more euphoric and reported more happiness in the self-report.
The anger condition did not show this, however those who knew side effects showed less anger.
The lesser reporting of anger could be caused by social desirability.
Conclusion:
Emotions occur by a process called cognitive labelling, where the same physiological response and the context creates the emotion.
