Schemas & Research

What is a schema?  Framework of knowledge  Affects our perception and understanding.  Organise information to help recall what we have seen/heard.

Palmer (1975)

Palmer (1975) – Aim & Method  Aim: To find out whether context would affect perception.  Method:  64 student participants  Laboratory experiment

Palmer (1975) – Method 2  Participants were shown a visual scene (see below) for 2 seconds to provide the context.  4 conditions (4 levels of the IV):  Appropriate: correctly recognising an appropriate objects that fits with the visual scene.  Inappropriate, similar: correctly recognising an inappropriate object, that looks similar to something expected in the visual scene.  Inappropriate, different: correctly recognising an inappropriate object that does not fit with the visual scene.  No context: correctly recognising an object, when provided with no visual scene.

Palmer (1975) – Method 3  The experiment was a repeated measures design.  The number of correctly identified objectives was the dependent variable.

Palmer (1975) – Results  What do these results show us?  What can you conclude from the results of Palmer (1975). Link this to the original aim.

Bartlett (1932)

Bartlett (1932) – Key definitions  Serial reproduction: a task where a piece of information is passed from one participant to the next in a chain or series. Differences between each version are measured.  Repeated reproduction: a task where the participant is given a story or picture to remember. They then recall it several times, after time delays. Differences between each version are measured.

Bartlett (1932) - Aim Aim: To investigate how information changes with each reproduction and to find out why the information changes.

Bartlett (1932) - Method Procedure:  Folk tale called ‘The war of the ghost’.  Deliberately strange, with ideas and names that were unfamiliar to the participants. Participants completed a serial reproduction task and repeated reproduction task.

Bartlett - Results Findings: Very few participants recalled the story accurately. Bartlett found changes to the following elements of the story:  Form  Details  Simplification  Addition The serial reproduction showed the same changes as the repeated reproductions. They also showed clearly how one individual’s interpretation affected all the others in the chain.

Bartlett - Conclusion Conclusion: Unfamiliar material changes when it is recalled. It becomes shorter, simpler and more stereotyped. This may be due to the effect of schemas on memory,

Carmichael, Hogan and Walter (1932)

Aim: to find out whether words shown with pictures would affect the way the pictures were remembered.

Carmichael, Hogan and Walter (1932) Procedure:  Laboratory experiment.  Ninety-five participants were split into three groups. They were shown 12 pictures.  Between each picture the experimenter said “the next figure resembles”…Followed by a word from either list 1 or list 2. A control group (of nine participants) heard no verbal labels.  These were the three levels of the independent variable. The experimental design was independent groups.  The participants were then asked to draw the pictures they had seen. Their drawings were compared to the originals. This was the dependent variable.

Carmichael, Hogan and Walter (1932) Findings: The drawings produced by people who heard list 1 were very different from the drawings by people who heard list 2. In each case the drawings looked like the words the participants had heard. In the list 1 group, 73 percent of the drawings resembled the word given. In the list 2 group, 74 percent resembled either one of the words. This shows that the words affected the participants’ memory of the drawings.

Carmichael, Hogan and Walter (1932) Conclusions: Memory for pictures is reconstructed. The verbal context in which drawings are learned affects recall because the memory of the word alters the way the picture is represented.