Schema Theory

What is a schema?

• Schema are mental representations that are derived from prior experience and knowledge.

• The bottom-up information derived from the senses is interpreted by the top-down influence of relevant schemas in order to determine which behavior is most appropriate.

• Schemas help us to predict what to expect based on what has happened before

• A schema holds all of the information that an individual has assimilated over the course of their life so far, obtained via direct personal experience

• A person’s schemas are not right or wrong, they are simply the product of assimilation and thus are subjective

Frame schemas

include the details and characteristics of an item or person or object

Script schemas

include the sequences and expectations as to what will be involved in an event or experience e.g. going to school involves taking the bus, chatting with friends at break, being in lessons, hearing the bell sound, being set homework etc.

Bartlett War of Ghosts - Aim

investigate how the memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge

Bartlett War of Ghosts - Procedure

• Told participants a Native American legend called the The War of the Ghosts. Participants were British, story was filled with unknown names and concepts, and the manner in which the story developed was foreign.

• Allocated participants to one of two conditions: group 1, asked to use repeated reproduction (heard the story then told to reproduce it after a short time and then to do so again repeatedly over a period of days, weeks, months, or years). Group 2, asked to used serial reproduction (recall the story and repeat it to another person)

Bartlett War of Ghosts - Results

• No significant difference between the way that the groups recalled the story. Found that both conditions changed the story as they tried remember it (distortion – act of giving misleading account or information). Found 3 patterns of distortion:

• Assimilation: the story became more consistent with the participants own cultural expectations – details change to fit British cultural norms

• Leveling: the story became shorter with each retelling as participants omitted information that was “not important”

• Sharpening: participants tended to change the order of the story in order to make sense of it, using terms more familiar to the culture of participants. Also added detail/or emotions

• Overall remembered main themes, but changed unfamiliar elements to match cultural expectations, so the story remained a coherent whole

Bartlett War of Ghosts - Findings/link

Study indicates that remembering is not a passive but rather an active process, where information is retrieved and changed to fit existing schemas. Done in order to create meaning in the incoming information.

Bartlett strengths:

• Bartlett's theory of reconstructive memory has several applications and explains many real-life situations. Thus, despite being carried out in a laboratory, it has high ecological validity.

Bartlett limitations

• Many textbooks conclude that culture affects our ability to recall information correctly; however, that is not the finding of this study.  The participants were British because it was assumed that the story would be culturally unfamiliar to them; in other words, they would not have the schema that would help to recall the study

• If we wanted to study the effect of culture on our ability to recall this story, we would have to carry out a quasi-experiment; there would have to be the British group and the Native American group, and the number of details correctly recalled would have to be compared.

Bransford and Johnson (1972) - background

• Bartlett refers to efforts after meaning, i.e. trying to make the past more logical, more coherent, and generally more ‘sensible’, which involves making inferences or deductions about what could or should have happened. 

• The way we do this relies on our past experience and cultural understandings - in other words, our schema influence our understanding and recall of an event.

• However, Bransford and Johnson (1972) argue that it is not simply having past experience, but "activating" schema that makes a difference.

Bransford and Johnson (1972) - aim

wanted to see if activating participants' schema would help them to remember details of a text.

Bransford and Johnson (1972) - procedure

• sample: 52 participants

• allocated to one of three conditions

  • No Topic group, participants heard a passage with no additional information. 

  • Topic After group, participants were told the topic of the passage after hearing it. 

  • Topic Before group participants were told the topic of the passage before hearing it.

• All participants were told that they were going to hear a tape-recorded passage. 

• told that they would later be asked to recall the passage as accurately as possible. 

• All participants were tested at the same time, but they had different answer booklets with

• Topic-Before group, their instruction sheet said, "The paragraph you will hear will be about washing clothes." 

• After listening to the passage, they were asked to rate their comprehension of the passage on a 1 - 7 scale.  Then, on the final page of the booklet, they were asked to recall the passage as accurately as possible.

• Topic After group's instructions included, "It may help you to know that the paragraph was about washing clothes."

• Participants were given five minutes for recall

• The researchers had decided on "idea units" before the experiment. Each participant's summary was independently scored by two judges, using the list of 18 idea units.

Bransford and Johnson (1972) - results

• No Context Group: Reported difficulties in understanding the passage and recalled very little.

• Context-Before Group: Demonstrated much better comprehension and recall, as the title provided a framework for understanding the text.

• Context-After Group: Showed intermediate results, benefiting from the title but still struggling compared to the Context-Before Group

Bransford and Johnson (1972) - findings

concluded that "prior knowledge of a situation does not guarantee its usefulness for comprehension. For prior knowledge to aid comprehension, it must become an activated semantic context."

Bransford and Johnson (1972) - strengths

• used an independent samples design; participant variability with regard to experience with washing clothes may be a confounding variable. repeated measures would not work

• Study is simplistic and easily replicated.  This allows researchers to determine the reliability of the findings.

• task is highly controlled, leading to high internal validity.  This means that a cause-and-effect relationship can be determined.

Bransford and Johnson (1972) - Limitations

• rather artificial, lacking ecological validity

• It is not possible to know that an actual "laundry schema" was active while listening to the text. There should be other reasons for the rate of recall - e.g. good memory skills

strengths of schema

• application; Early Maladaptive Schemas - pervasive, self-defeating patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that develop during childhood and continue to influence individuals throughout their lives (example Riso et al, found EMS are stable over time for those with depression)

• Testable

• Unbiased: Schema theory is applied across cultures. There is no apparent bias in the research, although most of the early research was done in the West.

• Predictive validity: The theory helps to predict behavior. We can predict, for example, what types of information will be best recalled when given a list of words.

Limitations of schema

• concept of a schema is often too ambiguous and lacks precise definitions, making it difficult to understand and apply in research contexts.

• allows it to accommodate a wide range of empirical data without providing strong predictive capabilities. This means it can often explain findings post hoc rather than predict outcomes, limiting its scientific testability

• does not clearly specify the processes involved in schema formation, activation, and modification. This lack of detail makes it challenging to understand how schemas are created and how they influence cognitive functions like memory

• Many studies supporting schema theory are conducted in controlled laboratory settings, which may not accurately reflect real-world situations. This raises questions about the ecological validity of the findings and their applicability to everyday cognitive processes