IB Psychology Cognitive Approach Schema Info

Contrast cognitive psychology to behaviourism

Cognitive Psychology is more about how the human mind comes to know things and studies the processes of the mind instead of only behaviour

Define cognition

Processes relating to one’s personal experiences

Top down processing

Information is processed in the mind via pre-stored information in memory

Bottom up processing

Input through sensory information through interaction with the environment

Cognitive Miser

Making the choice to not actively process information

Define Schema

mental representations derived from the senses in order to determine which behaviour is most appropriate

define assimiliation

adding to your schema essentially i guess

define script

patterns of behaviour that are learned through our interaction with the environment

Criticism Bartlett

• not being specific enough

• no significant independent variable was manipulated

  • methods were not scientific in modern sense

Brewer and Treyens

• Aim - investigate role of schema in the encoding and retrieval of episodic memory

• Procedure: 86 university students seated in a room that looks like an office. after 35 seconds the participants were called into another room and asked what they rembered from the office. 30 participants carried out written recall then verbal recognition, 29 only drawing, 27 only verbal. the recall condition (writing) was asked to describe the room to someone who’s never seen int and given a booklet rating 131 objects and asking if they were in the room with confidence levels (1-6), drawing condition asked to draw the objects they could remember. verbal recognition was read a list of objects and determine if they were in the room or not

• results: more likely to rmember objects more congruent w what they thought of an office than those incongruent, tended to change the nature of objects to match the schema too

assimilation deifnition

new information incorpprated into exising schemas

accomodation defintion

existing schemas might be altered or new schemas might be formed as a person learns new information and has new experiences

how do schema work

humans integrate new information with exising, stored information. schema theory predicts that what we already know will influence the outcome of information processing. in others words, new information is processed in the light of exisiting schem, schema can affect our cognritive processes

how is reconstructive memory related to schema

memory is reconstructive - accessing data points of a memory and not the full! related to the schema of what we are trying to recall

What did anderson and pitchert investigate

the rle of shcmea in encoding and recalling of a story

what did borland find

supported the reliablity of anderson and pitchert’s findings

what are two explanations regarding how schema helps with recall

a. Ideational scaffolding – whether we learn information or not depends on whether there is a niche for it

b. Schema may prime us to pay moe attention to certain information and not focus on other information

describe the procedure of anderson and pitchert

a. 39 educational psychology students were told a story with 72 discreet ideas. 15 were related to burglary and 13 related to buying a home. They were then allocated to either the home buyer or burglar condition. They were given two minutes to read the story and then given a distracter task of a 84 item, 12 minute vocabulary test before being told to write down as much of the information they remember from the story. Then they were given five minutes to do a spatial puzzle test before being told to recall the story a second time, either from the same perspective or different (half and half).

describe the results of anderson and pithcert

a.      The group that had the burglar perspective recalled more burglar information and the group that had the homebuyer perspective recalled more homebuyer information. Burglar information was better recalled than homebuyer information

evaluate anderson and pitchert

a. Highly controlled, artificial. High internal validity, low ecological validity.

b. Expectancy effect may have occurred, possible that some things were not written down out of thought of irrelevance

c. Could be that story was written in a way that burglary ideas were more engaging than the homebuyer details

what is effort after meaning

trying to make the past more logical choerent and sensible

what is the activation of a learner’s schema

the process in which textual stimuli signal the direction or area for the reader to look for and evoke the relevant schema from memory into the present reading tsk

describe the procedure and results of bransford and johnson

a.      Aims to determine if schema activation would result in a better understanding and recall of an ambiguous text

b.      52 participants allocated to one of three conditions, no topic, after topic, and topic before group (when/ if the topic was told). They were told they were going to hear a tape-recorded passage and told they would later recall it.

c.      The researchers 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."

evaluation of recall (4 things)

Distortion - participants changed the story as they tried to remember it

Assimilation - the story became more consistent with the participant’s own cultural expectations

Leveling - the story also became shorter with each retelling as participants omitted information that was seen as not important

Sharpening - participants also tended to change the order of the story to make sense of it using terms more familiar to the culture of the participants

Brewer and Treyens

The office one, The aim of the study was to investigate the role of schema in the encoding and retrieval of episodic memory. The basic assumption of schema theory is that individuals' prior experiences will influence how they remember new information.

The recall condition: Participants were asked to write down a description of as many objects as they could remember from the office. They were also asked to state the location, shape, size, and color of the objects. They were asked to "Write your description as if you were describing the room for someone who had never seen it." After this, they were given a recognition test in which they were given a booklet containing a list of objects. They were asked to rate each item for how sure they were that the object was in the room. "1" meant that they were sure it was not in the room; "6" meant that they were absolutely sure it was in the room. The questionnaire consisted of 131 objects: 61 were in the room; 70 were not.

The drawing condition: In this condition, participants were given an outline of the room and asked to draw the objects they could remember.

The verbal recognition condition: In this condition, the participants were read a list of objects and simply asked whether they were in the room or not.

Bartlett, war of ghosts

The aim of the study was to investigate how the memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge. He wanted to see if cultural background and unfamiliarity with a text would lead to distortion of memory when the story was recalled. Bartlett’s hypothesis was that memory is reconstructive and that people store and retrieve information according to expectations formed by cultural schemas.