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BEST Questions to use this for:

Discuss/evaluate schema theory.

To what extent is one cognitive process reliable?

In addition, it could be used in the sociocultural approach to discuss how sociocultural factors may affect cognitive processes. iN A WORST CASE COGNITIVE ERQ SCENARIO, you could use it for reconstructive memory

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Aim:

How memory is influenced by cultural schemas: in other words, how people’s existing knowledge, beliefs, and cultural background affect the way they remember and reconstruct unfamiliar information.

Procedure:

• Bartlett told participants a Native American legend called The War of the Ghosts
• The participants in the study were British, so for them the story was very unfamiliar to them, and filled with unknown names, concepts, and the way the story developed was also foreign to them
• This story made it ideal to study how memory was reconstructed based on cultural schemas, as the culture of the story was extremely different to the culture of the participants
• Bartlett allocated all the British Men to one of TWO conditions, where each group participated in a different type of reproduction of the story

1. Repeated Reproduction: Participants heard the story, and were asked to reproduce it after a short period time, and then asked to do it again after more time had passed. Approximately half the participants performed a repeated reproduction task, and returned to Bartlett's lab to reproduce the story several times, over periods of days, months, weeks, and years, depending on the participant – this is admittedly a rather informal method of collecting data.
2. Serial Reproduction: This was a method wherein participants were asked to recall and repeat the story to another individual

Results

• Bartlett found that the way they were asked to reproduce the story didn’t matter (There was no significant difference)
• Participants in both conditions changed the story as they tried to remember it: This is a mental memory process called distortion
• This mental process of distortion followed three distinct patterns

1. Assimilation: The story became more consistent with the participants cultural expectations through details unconsciously changing to fit the norms of british cultural norms and expectations. For example, Unfamiliar words were replaced with words more familiar to English culture – this is called assimilation, and it refers to the process by which new knowledge is made to fit into pre-existing schemas.
2. Leveling: The story also became shorter each time the participants told it. This is because participants omitted information that they did not see as important, and the information they saw as not important was largely impacted by their cultural schemas
3. Sharpening: Sharpening was the pattern of participants changing the entire order of the story, and essentially making sense of it using terms more familiar to their own cultural. In sharpening, the effects of assimilation were seen in the form of adding detail and emotions they found familiar. Even though the main themes of the story remained intact, the unfamiliar elements were all changed to match their cultural expectations.

What do these results mean?

Bartlett's study indicates that remembering is not a passive but rather an active process, where information is retrieved and changed to fit into existing schemas. This is done to create meaning in the incoming information. According to Bartlett, humans constantly search for meaning. Based on his research Bartlett formulated the theory of reconstructive memory. This means that memories are not copies of experiences but rather a reconstruction.

Evaluation of Bartlett