Cognitive Psychology: Schemata

Anguish Language

fake language that was made up by researchers, created words by taking words that are actual words that do not have similar meanings at all to the actual words

Bransford & Franks

showed that schemas are general, people form schemas to get the gist of the story rather than remembering exact words

Schema

a computer metaphor, gist representation or an event or topic or stimulus

4 Characteristics of Schemas

knowledge, general (general category), structured (can be hierarchal), aid in comprehension

Default Knowledge (Assumptions)

knowledge of values that are most likely the attributes of a particular schema

Embedding

schemas that fit within more broad categories

Bransford and Johnson - Balloon Passage

gave participants a passage to read, 1 group was shown image/schema of passage before, one only read the passage, and one group was shown the image after reading the passage; the only group that remembered a lot was the one that was presented a schema to understand beforehand

Scripts

type of schema repeated multiple times that becomes familiar, knowledge of a sequence of events that makes up a regular routine; guides behavior and helps navigate common activities by providing familiar structure

Bower, Black, & Turner (1979)

participants read 1-3 stories about visiting a distance and asked to recall events, recognition of studied sentences did not vary as a function of number of stories read; remembered details were consistent with event schemas rather than stories

Conrad's Confusion Matrix

technique to look at letter representations, errors are highly regular; subjects found confusion in identifying letters due to auditory similarities even though the letter was shown to them not read, short term memory primarily uses acoustic encoding

Acoustic Word Confusions

confusions between words that sound similar (hare vs hair)

Semantic Word Confusions

meaning of a word/what it defines is meaningfully related (lion tiger horse --> lion, tiger bear)

Categorical Word Confusions

intrusions in categorical recall

Tip of the Tongue State

feeling of inevitable retrieving, participants can usually recall first letter of the word and meaning, letter may be stored in different place, can predict amount of syllables

Spoonerism

swapping a part of a word with a part of another word

Malapropism

swapping a word you meant with one that is phonetically similar

Brewer- Sentence Representation

participants were asked to identify highlighted words in a sentence, the gist of the sentence is stored, different words mean different things in different contexts

Bridging Inferences

help us link new information to prior knowledge, ensuing the story or event makes sense

Marks and Miller

we don't just store the gist in terms of meaning, but also in structure and order of it

Story Grammar - Thorndyke

thorndyke had people read a random story and then read a second story with a different structure and some with a second similar structured story, when second story had a similar structure, they were able to remember it better

Text Models

literal understanding, focus on exact details

Situational Models

deeper meaning, text connected to real world knowledge

Verbatim vs Gist

people tend to rely on a gist, verbatim memory fades faster; schemas prioritize meaning over details