In the 1930's, Frederic Bartlett, a British psychologist from Cambridge University, performed several studies which helped pinpoint a theory of how we use past information to help us process new information. The idea of this theory is that new encounters with the world are rarely new to us. Rather, the way we process information or the way we act in specific settings, is determined by relevant previous knowledge stored in our memory and organized in the form of schemas. The schema theory therefore explains the influence of stored knowledge on our behavior, current information, and the way we process it. Schema theory both helps, but also hinders our accurate recall of memory. If you take into account, when you are told a story, you listen for the most important facts and conflicts presented. You use schema to remember it, insisting that it follows the patter of stories that you learned about before. The next time you tell the story, you use the details you remembered, as well as schemas to fill in the missing blanks. The study done by Bartlett in 1932, was a similar one to my example. In his study, he had his participants read The war of Ghosts, a Native American folk tale. This test showed how schema can be useful, although it helps lower the accuracy of our memory. Schemas are used for simple information- processing, and function to help us understand (although we might interpret our own meaning.)
In a French & Richards experiment of 1993, the effect of schema was studied on memory retrieval. In this study the participants were shown a simple picture of a clock. In one group, were told to draw the clock, after examining it, based on their memory. The clock on the picture had, instead of the conventional roman numeral IV, the representation of IIII. They found out that majority of participants that had to draw the clock from memory drew instead of the original IIII on the picture, the conventional IV of roman numerals. French and Richard explained this result in terms of schema knowledge of roman numerals to effect the participant's memory retrieval.
Another experiment, conducted by Loftus and Palmer in 1974, showed the bias of schema theory. They showed a group of students a video of a car accident. Each had a varied verb (smashed, bumped, collided, contracted), when asked the question: How fast were the cars going when they hit each other? These different verbs painted a different picture in our brain, and when weeks later, the participants were asked if they seen any broken glass, the ones that had a stronger verb (such as smashed or hit), showed a greater percentage of answering yes to the question. Our schema, is as well, affected by the memories we have, and when we are given the impression that cars are going fast and they have a accident, we think - there must have been broken glass! - that is what we have stored in our schema under car crashes with uncontrollable speed of cars. Because our schema is a knowledge stored, based upon stereotypical and logical facts that our brain automatically tries to fit pieces of puzzles together to make sense of what is happening. In eyewitness testimonies, or our own memories, schema also plays little tricks on us. When something happens and we are forced to remember it later, we fill the gaps with the most logical answers - things that we seen happen in situations like these before. In the case of Ronald Cotton, this could have been one of the reasons why he got blamed for a crime he did not do, and why the witness' faulty memory was taken into account as hard core evidence.
In conclusion, schemas can be both beneficial and misleading. It is like a human instinct that helps us use our knowledge in an order that it would make the most sense, yet it is easy to hold influenced over us. Schema is beneficial for understanding and organizing our ideas better. It helps us to get the main picture more quickly and clearly, but it can be easily affected by our past experience and false knowledge. This could lead to misjudgements and it may mess us up on details of our memory, as shown in the experiment of French & Richards. Either way, depending on many different factors that influence our schemas, schema itself has ups and downs, positive and negative effects but is a basic part of our lives and memories, and without it we would have a hard time to make sense of the action around us.
No comments:
Post a Comment