Schema theory

A mental representation or packet of stored knowledge about a specific topic

• Schema

• Assimilation

• Accomodation

• Confabulation

Schema can help to improve memory.

• True

• False

• Both true and false

A study that tests how schema affect retrieval

• Brewer and Treyens

• Glanzer and Cunitz

• HM

• Kahneman and Tversky

Schemas are universal.

• True

• False

Fitting new information/knowledge into existing schema e.g. animals schema, animals have four legs, so a zebra fits into the animal schema

• Assimilation

• Accomodation

• Distortion

• Confabulation

Changing the schema as we learn that our existing understanding/beliefs to not always correspond with evidence in the world, e.g. our schema states that animals have four legs, we learn that a snake is an animal but has no legs.

• Assimilation

• Accomodation

• Distortion

• Confabulation

Schema can impair memory - information may be changed during encoding to fit with schematic knowledge.

• Assimilation

• Accomodation

• Distortion

• Confabulation

Using schema knowledge (at retrieval) to fill in gaps in our memories based on what we expect to happen rather than what actually happened

• Assimilation

• Accommodation

• Confabulation

• Distortion

Proposed the concept of schema as a way of explaining effort after meaning, i.e. the way that we try to make sense of what we see using what we already know

• Brewer

• Bartlett

• Berne

• Bem

Brewer and Treyens aimed to investigate the way in which schema knowledge...

• affects our recall of congruent and incongruent items in a room

• affects recall of an story from an unfamiliar culture

• affected recalled of a confusing passage (about washing clothes or making a kite)

• Affected how trainee barristers decide whether a person should be given a higher or lower sentence