Schema psychology: Encyclopedia II - Schema psychology - Background research

Schema psychology - Background research

The original concept of schemas (NB: in reality the plural of 'schema' is 'schemata') is linked with that of Reconstructive Memory as proposed and demonstrated in a series of experiments by Bartlett (1932). By presenting participants with information that was unfamiliar to their cultural backgrounds and expectations and then monitoring how they recalled these different items of information (stories etc), Bartlett was able to establish that individuals' existing schemata and stereotypes influence not only how they interpret 'schema-foreign' new information but also how they recall the information over time. One of his most famous investigations involved asking participants to read a Native American folk tale, 'The War of the Ghosts', and recall it several times up to a year later. All the participants transformed the details of the story in such a way that it reflected their cultural norms and expectations - i.e in line with their schemata. The factors that influenced their recall were:

• Omission of information that was considered irrelevant to a participant;
• Transformation of some of the detail, or of the order in which events etc were recalled; a shift of focus and emphasis in terms of what was considered the most important aspects of the tale;
• Rationalisation: details and aspects of the tale that would not make sense would be 'padded out' and explained in an attempt to render them comprehensible to the individual in question;
• Cultural shifts: The content and the style of the story were altered in order to appear more coherent and appropriate in terms of the cultural background of the participant.

Bartlett's work was crucially important in demonstrating that long-term memories are neither fixed nor immutable but are constantly being adjusted as our schemata evolve with experience. In a sense it supports the existentialist view that we construct our past and present in a constant process of narrative/discursive adjustment, and that much of what we 'remember' is actually confabulated (adjusted and rationalised) narrative that allows us to think of our past as a continuous and coherent string of events, even though it is probable that large sections of our memory (both episodic and semantic) are irretrievable to our conscious memory at any given time.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Background research", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki