Cognitive approach Flashcards
What are schemas
hypothetical cognitive structures that organize knowledge stored in our memory,
mental representations of categories (from our knowledge, beliefs and expectations) about particular aspects of the world such as people, objects, events, and situations.
What are the different types of schemas
scripts (they provide information about how the order of events occur in particular contexts),
self-schemas (those that organize information we have about ourselves)
social schemas (represent information about groups of people such as stereotypes).
What is the schema theory
a branch of cognitive science concerned with how the brain structures knowledge, how schemes can influence our memory at all stages, both encoding and retrieval.
Existing knowledge is stored in our memory and organized in the form of schemas meaning it will affect information processing and behaviour in specific settings.
This means that information we are already aware of affects the way we interpret new information/events and how we store it in our memory.
What are the three stages of memory retrieval
- Encoding: transform the sensory image into a memory
- Storage: maintain the memory
- Retrieval: using the stored information for decision-making, problem-solving and thinking
Studies of Schema theory
Bradsford and Johnson
Anderson and Pichert
Aim of Bradsford and Johnson
to investigate how schemes help us to store new information in our memory
Design Bradsford and Johnson
Mixed design and random allocation only took part once, and they were randomly categorized into each variable.
Method of Bransford and Johnson (1972)
they made participants wisent to quite a long speech under three different experimental conditions as follows
- no title condition
- title before condition
- title after condition
participants were then asked to indicate how easy it was to understand and recall as much from it as possible. If they could not recall it word for word, they should recall as many as the main ideas as possible .
Results of Bransford and Johnson
of the 18 ideas in the paragraph contained, participants recalled on average:
- no title condition - 2.8 ideas
- title before conditions - 5.8 ideas
- title after condition - 2.6 ideas
Conclusion of Bransford and Pichert
these findings suggest that when participants were given the title of the paragraph before hearing it seemed to activate the schematic knowledge about what is involved with washing clothes during the encoding stage. This information helped to disambiguate the paragraph and participants immediately began to form mental images of what was happening. This study supported the idea that schemas improve comprehension and memory.
Strengths of Bransford and Johnson
independent measures, as the participants were placed into three groups (those who were given the title before the paragraph, those who were given the title afterwards and those who were not given a title at all) meaning that there were no order effects and therefore the risk of demand characteristics were reduced. All of these findings supported the schema theory.
Weakness of Bransford and Johnson
One weakness would be that the experiment was performed in a lab experiment, making it an artificial setting, (the conditions were artificial as they were asked to recall information from an obscure passage alone in a room) it makes it an unrealistic task, something the general population wouldn’t do meaning it lacks validity (people may not behave or access schemas in the same way in a real-life setting). It could however be argued that it would apply to how students access schematic knowledge in a learning/exam setting.
Aim of Anderson and Pichert
to investigate the influence of schema on the retrieval of information from long-term memory
Method of Anderson and Pichert
Experiment; mixed design
Participants of Anderson and Pichert
psychology students participating for a course requirement
Procedure of Anderson and Pichert
- participants were assigned either a homebuyer or a burglar perspective
- They were then asked to read a text passage about a house where two boys were staying to skip school. The passage contained a total of 73 ideas, some being potentially interesting to a burglar or some real estate agent
- Participants were given a filler task then asked to reproduce the story in writing as accurately as possible
4 Participants were given another filler task, then some were required to change the initial perspective (from a homebuyer to a burglar or vice versa). Other participants ket the initial perspective.
5 participants had to reproduce the story one more time without reading it again
Results of Anderson and Pichert
for the first recall, burglar perspective recalled more burglar event and vice versa
participants who then changed perspective recalled more information (additional 7.1%) important to the second perspective but unimportant to the first.
they ddi not read the passage a second time so the information had been encoded but not received, changing perspective influenced retrieval not encoding
What is the conclusion of Anderson and Pichert
perspective in this situation is a type fo schema, the study supports the idea that schemas influence the process fo retrieval and already stored information from memory
Strength of Anderson and Pichert
controlled laboratory experiment (the fact that the participants were put under the same conditions as they read the same story and were asked the same questions) allowed researchers to determine a cause-and-effect relationship on how schemas affect different memory processes.
Limitation of Anderson and pichert
similarly to the other study, the laboratory setting lacked ecological validity meaning it was an unrealistic task, not reflecting how the general population would behave in their daily life. However, this study provides evidence to support schema theory affecting the cognitive process of memory.
Strengths of schema theory
- Helps recall the ‘gist’ of a story/situation(memory saving)
- Helps us understand information more readily when we encounter for the first time and we fill in gaps with default retrieval.
- The theory has helped us understand reconstructive memory in different contexts, eye witness memory, stereotyping, gender identity and cultural differences.
Overall, schema theory is a credible theory as it provides an explanation for how knowledge is stored in the mind and there is much research that supports this theory such as the Bransford and Johnson study and the Anderson and Pichert study.
limitation of schema theory
- Difficult to recall gist of story/situation when it is unusual or unfamiliar.
Information not make sense with our schema is often ignored, distorted or forgotten. - May cause inaccurate stereotyped or prejudiced thinking. Cohen said that schemas are still too vague and it is not clear how they are formed in the first place.
- Schema theory focus too much on the inaccuracies of memory nut most of the time it helps us to aid our memory.
What is reconstructive memory
a theory of memory recall in which the facts of remembering is influenced by other cognitive processes such as beliefs, perception, imagination, systematic memory and attention
What is memory suggested to be in reconstructive memory
an active process that involves the reconstruction of memory however it does not have a clear procedure on how memories are encoded in the mind as evidence suggests it is a constructive cognitive process
