Introduction

• Humans don’t just respond to stimuli. They also process information

• Generally speaking, there are two types of information processing: bottom-up and top-down.

  • Bottom-up processing: occurs when the cognitive process is data-driven

    • Perception is not biased by prior knowledge/expectations

    • Pure information that is based on reality as it is.

  • Top-down processing: occurs when prior knowledge or expectations (schemas) alter how information is received and processed.

• Mental representations: mental images that represent our external reality

  • Schemas are mental representations derived from prior experience and knowledge

Schema Theory

• A combination of ideas about how our mind organizes information and how this can affect cognitions (memory and thinking) and behavior.

• The theory views knowledge as an elaborate network of abstract mental structures that represent the understanding we have of the world.

  • Knowledge of the world is organized and categorized in clusters called schemas.

• Schemas are used to:

  • organize knowledge

  • assist recall

  • guide behavior

  • predict likely happenings

  • help us make sense of current experiences

• Schemas are stable and resistant to change

  • This allows continuity in how we process information and how we act.

• Schemas are unconscious and automatic

  • This is why they might affect behavior

• Schemas also allow us to make sense of the environments very well

• Rumerhalt and Normal (1983)

  • They argued that schemas represent knowledge, including semantic meanings and procedures.

  • Types of schemas:

    • Social Schemas: mental representations of various groups of people

      • Stereotypes are stored here

    • Scripts: Schemas about sequences of events

      • not about objects but about how events are carried out (e.g., shower routine)

    • Self Schemas: Representations about ourselves

Schema and Memory

• Brewer and Treyens (1981)

  • Aim: To see whether the schema people had about a place would affect the way they remembered the space

  • Participants: 30 university students

  • Procedure:

    • Each participant was taken into an office and left alone for 35 seconds

      • The experimenter said this was his office and they should wait there while he checked if the lab space was ready

    • The participants were then taken to another room and were asked to write down everything they remembered about the office.

  • Findings: Participants often remembered things that would be found in a typical office (e.g., cabinets, books, pens and pencils, coffee cups, windows, and curtains), but these items weren’t actually in the office they visited.

    • Only 8/30 students recalled the skull. A few recalled the coffee pot, and 1/30 recalled the picnic basket.

• Baggett (1975)

  • Aim: to see how schemas are present in memory for explicit and implicit information in picture stories.

  • Procedure: Participants were shown a series of 3 pictures that told a story

    • #1: a person with long hair entering a barber shop

    • #2: same person sitting in a barber’s chair

    • #3: person leaving shop with shorter hair

    • In a later test participants were shown a 4th picture of the barber cutting the person’s hair

  • Findings: People were good at remembering that the 4th picture was not a part of the original sequence. However, if the test happened 1 week later, they claimed they had seen the 4th picture in the original sequence.

  • Conclusion: This study shows how we include information derived from our schemata into our memory.

• Anderson and Pitchert (1978)

  • Aim: To see how schemata influence memory encoding and retrieval.

  • Participants: 96 college students

  • Proccedure: Participants were given 2 min. to read a story (about two boys skipping school) that had a total of 73 ideas.

    • They were given 1 point per idea they remembered from the perspective they were given (house buyer or burglar)

    • After writing it down they did a distraction task for 12 min.

    • They were then told to write it down again either as the same perspective as before or the opposite perspective. (4 groups)

  • Findings: The participants that stayed with their original schema mainly remembered details relevant to their perspective.

    • The people who switched schemas (groups 3 and 4) remembered more information about their switched perspective. The recalled an additional 7% of the now important information. However, participants in groups 1 and 2 recalled 3% of the still irrelevant information.

  • Conclusion: This shows that the processes of encoding and retrieval are different, and that participants encoded more information than they could retrieve.

• Selection of schema

  • What schemas are selected depend on factors like: accesibility and priming.

    • Accesibility: how easily a schema comes to mind. This is determined by personal experience and expertise.

      • Can be used as a cognitive shortcut and allows for the most common explanation to be chosen for new information

    • Priming: When you are exposed to a stimulus that activates a schema so the ambiguous information is processed by that schema

• Modification of a schema

  • They can be modified through assimilation and accommodation

    • Assimilation: Taking new information into a pre-exisiting schema

    • Accomodation: Process that involves changing or altering our schemas because of new information

  • Desiquilibrium: When a new piece of information does not fit into an existing schema, unbalancing our understanding of the world

  • Bartlett (1932)

    • Believed that LTM are not fixed or unchangeable but are consistently being adjusted as our schemas evolve.

Evaluating the Schemas Theory

• Strengths

  • Schema theory has substantial empirical support

    • There are a lot of studies that support the theory (Bartlett, Caramazza, Anderson and Pitchert, Brewer and Treyens, and Bagette)

    • Caramazza (2009)

      • Used and fmri and found that from the visual cortex, information about living and non-living things is shuttled into different parts of the brain (even in blind participants).

      • This suggests that our brain automatically sorts information and classifies it in the same way the schema theory predicts.

  • Schema theory is testable

    • Anderson and Pitchert

  • Schema theory can be applied across cultures

  • Schema theory can be applied to explain behavior and cognitions

• Limitations

  • Reductionist/mechanist view of mental processes

  • Schemas cannot be observed