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IB HL/SL Psychology (cognitive): Describe one research study related to Schema Theory (9 marks)
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A level 7 short answer describing one research study related to Schema Theory.
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Describe one research study related to Schema Theory [8]One principle of the cognitive level of analysis (CLoA) states that mental processes and
representations guide behaviour. There is a relationship between peoples’ mental representations
and the way that they perceive and process information, and this can be explained through
Schema Theory. A schema is a mental representation of knowledge stored in the brain; it can be
seen as a network of knowledge, beliefs and expectations about particular aspects of the world,
which is built up through experience and is subject to change. Schema processing is automatic to
a large extent, involving the information input via the sensory system, and information already
stored within memory. Combining these two sources of information allows humans to associate
new experiences with things they have experienced before, in order to better understand incoming
information and react appropriately. Hence schemas serve a role in helping people to make sense
of the world, make predictions about it and provide guidance on how to behave.
Schema Theory was devised by Bartlett [1932] after his seminal study named ‘War of the Ghosts’,
which aimed to investigate whether peoples’ memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge
(schemas) and to what extent memory is reconstructive. Bartlett gathered British students and
asked them to listen to an story called ‘The War of the Ghosts’, which originated from a North
American Legend, and used vocabulary and sentence structure unfamiliar to British language. As
the content and development of the story was unfamiliar, this meant that the participants were
more likely to rely on schema processing to understand it, by relating it to their own experiences.
He then asked the participants to reproduce the story after a short time, and then over a period of
months or years (serial reproduction). Bartlett found that the participants changed the story as they
tried to remember it in a process called distortion; there were three patterns of distortion that took
place. The story was assimilated, meaning that the content and development of it became more
consistent with the participants’ own British cultural expectations. The story was levelled, meaning
that with each subsequent reproduction the story omitted more information that was seen as less
important. Finally, the story was sharpened in response to it’s unfamiliar structure and
development, meaning that the order of events was rearranged in order to make sense of it from
the participant’s own cultural perspective. The participants retained the main themes of the story
but changed the unfamiliar elements to match their own cultural expectations so that the story
remained coherent.
From these results, Bartlett concluded that memory is an active process, where information is
retrieved and altered to fit into existing schema, in order to make sense of unfamiliarity. Therefore,
memories are not replications of information, but rather they are reconstructions, combining
original information with information retrieved from schemas to create an overall impression of an
event or concept. Bartlett argued that this process of schematic processing is a way for humans to
add meaning and understanding to the world in the absence of it.
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