Schema theory

Bugelski and Alampay (1961)

•Primed participants by showing pictures of either
•Condition 1: animals
•Condition 2: faces
•Then showed participants an amibiguous figure that looked both like a rat and a man's face.
•Condition 1: participants saw a rat
•Condition 2: participants saw a man wearing glasses

Illustrated that we perceive through two processes- Bottom-up: reality is based on sensory input, and, Top-down- Implicit expectations influence perception

cognitive schema

set of beliefs or expectations that represent a network of already accumulated knowledge

Jean Piaget

Swiss clinical psychologist known for his pioneering work in child development. The processes of adaptation, accomodation and assimilation of information, into one's cognitive schema, are how children learn, according to this dude.

Sir Frederic Bartlett

People remember how a story "should" end rather than how it actually did end.

Our memory is influenced by our mind (our knowledge, hopes, aspirations, and desires) rather than a photographic representation of actual events. How our culture educates us has a deciding role in what we are able to perceive.

Encoding

the processing of information into the memory system- storing new knowledge, beliefs and expectations

Retrieval

the process of bringing to mind information that has been previously encoded- rembembering/thinking

Bransford and Johnson (1972)

In condition one, participants heard a story and were not given a title for the story they had heard. In condition two, participants were told the title of the story before hearing the actual story. The third, and final group of participants (in condition three), were told the title of the speech after it had been given. Researchers found that participants that had been in condition one and three had a more difficult time understanding the speech, than those in condition two. They concluded that the title activated a schema for participants in the second condition, allowing them to be more receptive of its content.

Anderson and Pichert (1978)

Participants were given one schema at the encoding stage and one schema at the retrieval stage, to see if they were influenced by the last schema when they had to recall the information. The participants heard a story that was based on 72 points. Half of the participants were asked to read the story for the point of view of a house-buyer and the other half from the point of view of a burglar. After a break, half of the participants were given a different schema, so the burglars switched to the buyers and vice versa. The other half were tested on their original schema again. The researchers found that the group of participants in the changed schema group were able to recall 7 percent more points on the second test than on the first one.

Darley and Gross (1983)

participants received a picture and some information about a fourth- grade girl named Hannah. To activate a schema about her social class, Hannah was pictured sitting in front of a nice suburban house for one-half of the participants and pictured in front of an impoverished house in an urban area for the other half. Then the participants watched a video that showed Hannah taking an intelligence test. As the test went on, Hannah got some of the questions right and some of them wrong, but the number of correct and incorrect answers was the same in both conditions. Then the participants were asked to remember how many questions Hannah got right and wrong. Demonstrating that schema had influenced memory, the participants who thought that Hannah had come from an upper-class background remembered that she had gotten more correct answers than those who thought she was from a lower-class background.

Bower, Black, & Turner (1979)

Researchers used short texts describing sequential events (i.e. visiting the dentist- having a toothache, making an appointment, checking in at reception, etc.); some of the steps in the descriptions were intentionally missing. When reading texts, participants would fill in gaps and recall actions that were not actually in the text (ex: they may recall checking in with the receptionist at the dentist office even if this was omitted from the description of actions).

Script

a knowledge framework that describes the appropriate sequence of events in a given situation

social schema

a general knowledge structure, stored in long-term memory, that relates to social experiences or people

Aaron Beck's cognitive theory of depression

negative thoughts, generated by dysfunctional beliefs, are typically the primary cause of depressive symptoms. A direct relationship occurs between the amount and severity of someone's negative thoughts and the severity of their depressive symptoms (the more negative thoughts you experience, the more depressed you will become).

There are 3 main dysfunctional belief themes (or "schemas") that dominate depressed people's thinking: 1.) I am defective or inadequate, 2.) All of my experiences result in defeats or failures, and 3.) The future is hopeless.

Together, these 3 themes are described as the Negative Cognitive Triad. When these beliefs are present in someone's cognition, depression is very likely to occur

self-schema

beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information

pattern recognition

The classification of a stimulus into a category.

Effort after meaning

Connecting a stimulus with knowledge or experience that is already possessed. Once the stimulus gains meaning, it can be more readily stored.