Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All.
Table of Contents. Historical Background. How Schemas Change. How Schemas Affect Learning. Resistance to Change. Was this page helpful?
Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
Child Development. Los Angeles: Sage; London: Hodder Education; Related Articles. Adaptation in Piaget's Theory of Development. As mentioned briefly before, the location of the home can be seen as a contextual aspect to the more central face-home association that could be implicitly learned during the task. Each of the 72 learned faces was shown for 2 s in the middle of the screen, which also showed a hexagonal pattern of six gray circles, reflecting the positions of the homes during learning.
Subjects responded by selecting one of the gray circles with the cursor, after which confidence was rated. This contextual memory task was self-paced and lasted approximately 10 min.
Finally, a questionnaire was administered to assess whether subjects intentionally encoded the locations of the homes along with the face-home associations during encoding. In the current experiment, the location is intended as contextual to the more central face-home association. Break periods were manually removed from the continuous filtered EEG high pass filter: 0.
Independent Component Analysis ICA was used to remove eye blinks, eye movements, and other noise components from the continuous EEG data noise rejection was based on criteria published by the NBT: www.
This resulted in four conditions of interest: schema-congruent old faces, schema-congruent new faces, schema-incongruent old faces and schema-incongruent new faces. Please note that lure faces were not used for the EEG analyses, but were included for behavioral analyses only. Per subject, EEG data was first averaged across trials in a condition, and then averaged across the five electrodes in a ROI. Finally, a single mean amplitude was calculated, by averaging across the time points within our time window of interest — ms; Woodruff et al.
As we were interested in studying the neural correlates of a potential schema effect, data from subjects that did not show the schema manipulation in their behavioral responses was excluded, in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. To quantify the schema effect on an individual basis, we first summed the correct identification scores of old and lure faces for each schema condition separately.
Next, the summed score in the schema-congruent condition was subtracted from the summed score in the schema-incongruent condition. Thirty-six subjects had positive difference scores whereas a mere six showed either no difference or a negative difference score.
These six subjects were excluded from the EEG analysis. As the behavioral data was largely non-normally distributed, Wilcoxon Paired Signed Rank tests were used to compare the schema-congruent and schema-incongruent conditions. As there were 36 faces in each condition, this was always the maximum score. During the learning phase, subjects could make use of the schema to connect the schema-congruent faces to their homes. As performance was much higher in the schema-congruent condition, this convincingly shows that subjects used the schema to their advantage.
Table 1. Average response frequencies for old, similar and new images, in the schema-congruent and schema-incongruent conditions. Together, these findings clearly show that memory discriminability for schema-congruent items was markedly inferior to memory for schema-incongruent items. To test the hypothesis that the use of a schema leads to contextually impoverished memories, we tested whether subjects could remember where the homes were located during the encoding session.
Moreover, in the incongruent condition, confidence was higher schema-incongruent mean : 3. The questionnaire results revealed that a few subjects intentionally encoded the location of the faces during encoding, even if only for some faces.
The combined behavioral results thus show a clear memory disadvantage for schema-congruent items. This is apparent for recognition memory of the target items faces and even more so for schema-irrelevant contextual information. Memory performance suggests that retrieval of schema-incongruent items might involve more recollection i.
We first investigated whether there were differences in the average ERP amplitudes — ms time window for the schema-congruent new and the schema-incongruent new condition.
Figure 3. A Line graphs show average ERP waveforms for the schema-incongruent, schema-congruent and new condition, for the left upper part and right lower part parietal ROI. Bar graphs on the right show ERP amplitudes averaged across this time window, for each condition. B Topographic maps of amplitude differences between the congruent old vs. These findings support the notion that schema-incongruent memories were contextually richer than schema-congruent memories.
Such a correlation would strengthen the notion that the ERP effects described in the previous section indeed reflect differences between conditions with regard to contextual memory retrieval.
We correlated the average ERP amplitudes in the schema-incongruent old and schema-congruent old condition with the contextual memory scores i. Figure 4. The present study set out to test whether schemas induce shallow encoding of goal-irrelevant information.
The results confirm our hypothesis: both item and context memory accuracy were strongly reduced in the schema-congruent condition. Moreover, recollection-related ERP amplitudes were larger for the schema-incongruent condition as compared to the schema-congruent condition, further supporting the hypothesis that memories for schema-congruent items are contextually impoverished.
In the present paradigm, each face stimulus was presented multiple times during the learning phase, and some level of attention to the face was always needed to select the corresponding home. These paradigm characteristics, considering also the fast processing of face stimuli by our brain Itier and Taylor, ; Pegna et al.
Still, large differences were observed between memory for the schema-congruent and schema-incongruent faces. In the face recognition test, the schema-congruent faces were less likely to be recognized, and were more often falsely endorsed as new. With regard to memory for contextual aspects of the learning episode, the difference between the schema conditions was even higher.
It thus appears that the use of schemas strongly impairs memory formation, which is intriguing given the ample opportunity subjects had to form strong memory traces. The ERP results provide further support for differences in memory quality between the schema conditions.
This ERP effect is generally most pronounced over parietal electrode sites and may be left lateralized Schloerscheidt and Rugg, ; Wilding, ; Finnigan et al.
In the present study, the schema-congruent faces elicited a left-lateralized ERP effect, whereas the effect was bilateral in the schema-incongruent condition.
Indeed, in the right parietal region the schema-incongruent ERP amplitude was significantly higher than the schema-congruent one. We like to speculate that this difference reflects the stronger recollection in the schema-incongruent condition. This notion is strengthened by the positive correlation between average ERP amplitude in the schema-incongruent old condition, especially on the right side, and the availability of spatial context memory.
In fact, as spatial information processing tends to be largely lateralized to the right hemisphere Smith et al. The current findings extend previous work from our lab that showed poor memory for visual details when regularities can be extracted across the material to be learned Sweegers and Talamini, In that study, the negative influence on storage of arbitrary schema-irrelevant stimulus aspects may have been related to the process of regularity extraction.
We now show that such negative effects on memory encoding also occur when a pre-established schema is used. Thus, at least part of the effect is related to schema use, rather than schema formation. We, moreover, now show that such regularities, or schemas, also impair context memory retrieval, and that this is evidenced by changes in the underlying neural networks. So how do schemas exert these negative effects on memory formation? In the present study, schemas appeared to particularly alter memory processing during the encoding phase, as poor memory for schema-items was already evident shortly after learning.
This was also the case in our previous study Sweegers and Talamini, , which, in addition, showed similar retention of visual detail for schema-congruent and incongruent items during a 4 h post-encoding interval. Schema effects on retrieval processes are unlikely to have contributed importantly to the findings, as the adopted recognition task places relatively low demands on retrieval processes.
Importantly, our findings indicate that schemas exert their influence on memory not only through facilitation of information storage, as shown previously, but also through suppression thereof. They show that such suppression occurs for schema-related information that is irrelevant to the pursuit of momentary goals.
Importantly, this highlights the notion that schemas direct attention and learning in relation to momentary goals. When such goals require memorizing novel input, schemas may help to direct attention to the relevant input and provide the background knowledge necessary for fast interpretation and storage of that input.
For example, it has been shown that after extensive training on various flavor-place associations, rats can acquire a new association in a single trial Tse et al. In another study, schema knowledge regarded the types of fabric generally used to make particular products van Kesteren et al. Here, it was found that such a schema greatly aided in memory formation for congruent product-fabric pairs.
In both the rat and the human study, memorizing the individual schema-related novel items was highly relevant in relation to task goals, suggesting that schemas help memory storage in such situations. There are, however, also situations where schemas can sufficiently inform goal-directed behavior, so that memorizing novel input is not directly necessary.
Here, schemas appear to hamper memory storage, even of material that is directly task-related. Such a mechanism might be expected to have considerable evolutionary benefit, preventing the storage of redundant information and sparing processing capacity for more important computations. Indeed, we propose the combined findings regarding schema effects on learning are best understood in terms of interactions between schemas and active goals steering attention and influencing memory processing.
Thus, not only stimulus novelty in relation to the schema , but also stimulus relevance in relation to current goals will influence the level of encoding. In short, depending on momentary goals, schemas may exert different influences on memory formation, steering attention so as to promote the efficient use of information processing capacity.
Interactions between schemas and momentary goals, as investigated by us, have not received much attention previously. However, several other factors influencing schema effects on memory have been identified. These factors are of considerable importance in understanding the variable effects of schemas on memory in different situations and are hence briefly discussed hereafter see Stangor and McMillan, , for a detailed account.
First and foremost, a considerably body of evidence e. These effects act at the level of memory search and retrievability of the item. Accordingly, the way in which memory is cued i. Indeed, this effect is particularly apparent when schema information is used to cue the target memory.
In view of the above, studies specifically addressing effects of schemas on memory encoding should always use measures corrected for response bias unfortunately, this is not always the case. Studies that do not correct for this response bias tend to find better memory for schema-congruent than schema-incongruent items. The benefit for schema-incongruent effects is thought to be induced by the relative novelty of the incongruent item, which favors synaptic plasticity and learning.
In other words, this effect is related to effects of schemas on encoding, rather than on retrieval. Several variables have been shown to modulate the above schema effects. One of these is the strength of the top down expectancy generated by the schema the strength of the expectancy used to guide information processing and the extent to which the bottom up, sensory data driven information deviates from the expectancy.
So, dependent on the size of the prediction error and the balance with other factors modulating the schema effect there may a relative encoding advantage for schema-incongruent compared to schema-congruent items see van Kesteren et al. An important consideration in this respect is that schemas learned in the laboratory used in most recent studies may induce a relatively weak expectancy compared to schemas developed through real life experience, such as various social and cultural schemas used in many older studies.
Memory, trauma treatment, and the law. New York, NY: Norton. Ceci, S. Repeatedly thinking about a non-event: Source misattributions among preschoolers. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal, 3 3—4 , — Darley, J. A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44 , 20— Doob, A. Television viewing and fear of victimization: Is the relationship causal? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 2 , — Dunning, D.
The overconfidence effect in social prediction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58 4 , — Erdmann, K. Children report suggested events even when interviewed in a non-suggestive manner: What are its implications for credibility assessment? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18 5 , — Gilovich, T. Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. Jacoby, L. False remembering in the aged. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15 2 , 49— Kahneman, D. Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives.
Psychological Review, 93 , — Lilienfeld, S. Giving debiasing away: Can psychological research on correcting cognitive errors promote human welfare? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4 4 , — Loftus, E. The malleability of human memory. American Scientist, 67 3 , — The myth of repressed memory: False memories and allegations of sexual abuse 1st ed. New York, NY: St. Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory.
The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25 12 , — MacLeod, C. Memory accessibility and probability judgments: An experimental evaluation of the availability heuristic.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63 6 , — Mazzoni, G. Changing beliefs about implausible autobiographical events: A little plausibility goes a long way. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7 1 , 51— McArthur, L. Figural emphasis and person perception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13 6 , — McNally, R.
Does early psychological intervention promote recovery from posttraumatic stress? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4 2 , 45— Medvec, V. When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists. Miller, D. Particularistic and universalistic evaluation in the social comparison process.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 55, — Pope, H. Is dissociative amnesia a culture-bound syndrome? Findings from a survey of historical literature. Pratkanis, A. In search of reliable persuasion effects: III. The sleeper effect is dead: Long live the sleeper effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54 2 , — Rassin, E.
When dreams become a royal road to confusion: Realistic dreams, dissociation, and fantasy proneness. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 7 , — Roese, N. If only: How to turn regret into opportunity. Background information on participants is summarized in Table 1. The results were consistent with the literature e. One hundred and thirty-six words were selected from the English lexicon project Balota et al. The words were all two-syllable nouns of seven to nine letters in length, and they all had no orthographic, phonological, or phonographic neighbors.
Finally, words were selected to be non-plural, non-names, and non-offensive. Words were manually entered into matched pairs that fit within 12 different categories with five or six pairs per category see Appendix. Categories were a nonobvious grouping that linked the words of a pair together e. The word pairs were placed into pair lists with each list featuring six different categories two or three pairs from each of six categories. Two versions of the experimental stimuli were formed, each with four lists of 17 pairs.
The two versions used the same individual pairs but these were grouped into lists differently. Each of the four lists had a buffer pair at the beginning and end for which memory was not tested later. The two versions of the stimuli used the same pairs as buffers. All memory stimuli were presented in black font on a white background and all materials were shown on a laptop computer running E-Prime 2. Participants were shown pairs of words for a later cued recall test.
Word pairs were presented in a lowercase font in random order and were studied for either 4 s per pair or 8 s per pair fast vs. Each participant viewed schema-present and schema-absent lists for each of the presentation rates i. Participants received practice before both the schema-present and the schema-absent conditions in order to ensure that they were familiar with the task. The two short practice tests each replicated the full study—test procedure of a single experimental condition with independent stimuli and with just six trials.
In the schema-present condition, the category to relate the words of each pair was presented in uppercase immediately above each word pair. Participants were instructed to try to remember which words were presented together and were told that above each word pair was a clue that stated something that the words had in common. For each study pair, there was an interstimulus interval of ms, where the screen remained blank. This was followed by the presentation of the category alone for ms, and then the category remained on the screen whilst the memory stimuli were presented for either 4 s or 8 s fast or slow presentation.
This allowed participants to process the category initially before memorizing each word pair. They were told that they could use this information if they wanted to in order to help memorize the associations. Here, participants were instructed to ignore the Xs as they were not relevant to the memory test.
Schema-present and schema-absent conditions were balanced across participants such that a given word pair was seen with a category by one participant and without a category by another participant at both encoding speeds. Categories used in the schema-present condition were not used in the schema-absent condition for each participant in order to prevent participants guessing the category labels in the schema-absent condition.
These were presented in white font on a black background to differentiate them from the memory test. For cued recall, participants were then shown the left word of each pair and were asked to verbally report the word that it was originally paired with whilst their voice was digitally recorded.
Note that no category labels were presented at test. Participants were given as long as they needed to recall each word and the experimenter pressed a button once a response was made to present the next cue word.
There was a ms interstimulus interval in between each word. The cue words were selected in a random order. For counterbalancing, participants viewed both schema-present lists or both schema-absent lists first. Within each of these two conditions, either the fast encoding or the slow encoding was presented first. Response times RTs were also measured as the experimenter clicked a mouse button as soon as a word was recalled the same experimenter tested every participant.
RTs were not counted if the participant changed their answer after saying another word, if the participant pronounced the word very slowly whilst still recalling it, if the participant spoke before responding, if the participant responded after moving on to the next word, and finally if the experimenter had to ask the participant if they wanted to move on. Throughout the article, standard null hypothesis tests are accompanied by estimating a Bayes Factor implemented through JASP computer software Love et al.
For example, a BF 10 of 0. That is, when a schema was provided for participants, it hindered their memory performance. Older adults produced more intrusions than young adults in all cases except for the fast schema-present condition. This interaction suggests that the negative effects of schema presence can be overcome when encoding speed is slow, when participants have more time to process each association.
This is in line with the accuracy data in that responses were faster in the more accurate condition. RTs for intrusions were not analyzed only 11 young and 13 older adults had data in every cell. Providing young and older participants with a schematic link between to-be-associated words at encoding did not improve memory or alleviate age deficits in associative memory.
Schemas can have a negative impact on memory performance. According to the false memory literature, activation of a schema can often lead to false memory for non-presented information that is consistent with the activated schema.
Roediger and McDermott presented participants with a list of words to remember for a later free recall test, where all the words e. After studying such lists, a high proportion of participants falsely recalled the non-presented target word and often with high confidence. These negative effects of schemas cannot be applied to the current result, as intrusions were few and were similar in the schema-present and schema-absent conditions; moreover, the use of multiple schemas within each block likely discouraged schema-based extrapolation.
Additionally, some studies find superior memory for schema-inconsistent information than for schema-consistent information. This occurs when schema-inconsistent information stands out because it does not fit with a context and has been demonstrated in a variety of distinctiveness paradigms cf. This effect cannot be applied to the current data either, because the design did not include any schema-inconsistent stimuli only schema-absent stimuli.
The negative effects of schema presence were likely due to the processing cost of applying the schematic information during encoding. Naveh-Benjamin, Craik, Guez, and Kreuger assessed the use of processing resources during encoding of related and unrelated word pairs in young and older adults they manipulated processing resources by introducing a secondary task at encoding in Experiment 1.
The encouragement of encoding strategies was also manipulated by suggesting sentence generation and mental imagery to half of the young and older participants. That result is in line with the current data, where schema activation required processing resources. However, in the Naveh-Benjamin et al.
This suggests that the current schemas were difficult to apply to the associations, possibly because the design required them to be nonobvious unless highlighted. Experiment 2 aimed to create more obvious schematic information by manipulating schema use with related and unrelated word pairs. Given that schema use at encoding hindered paired associate performance in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 aimed to make the schema-orienting labels simpler and to make schematic information easier to use.
Young and older participants completed a paired associates task as in Experiment 1. Within each study list, half of the pairs were related and half were unrelated. In three conditions, different types of support were given to participants: In an encoding support condition, a label was presented during encoding to indicate if each pair was related or not.
In a retrieval support condition, a label was presented during retrieval to indicate if each pair was related or not. In a control condition, no labels were provided.
Thirty-one young and 30 older adults took part in the experiment see Table 1 for further details. They were all native English speakers and were recruited and rewarded in the same manner as in Experiment 1. Young and older participants did not differ significantly in their years of education, t Word pairs were constructed from stimuli used in Badham et al. For each target word, there was a semantically related word and an unrelated word see Badham et al.
This resulted in a total of words capable of forming 45 related and 45 unrelated word pairs. These words were used to randomly construct three study lists for each participant. The lists consisted of eight related and eight unrelated word pairs presented in a random order i. Each target word was only used once, and correspondingly, no words were repeated across the three lists. The first and last pairs of words were used as buffers and were not cued in the retrieval phase.
The buffers were one related and one unrelated pair each placed randomly at either the beginning or the end of the list. Buffer words were not taken from the main set of words and were independently generated. Three practice lists were also produced using independent sets of six related and six unrelated word pairs. Word pairs were presented in a lowercase font in random order for either 3 s per pair young adults or 6 s per pair older adults. The different presentation durations were used to equate performance between young and older adults and were the same as used in previous studies e.
This was followed by the presentation of the relatedness label for ms, and then the relatedness label remained on screen whilst the memory stimuli were presented. This allowed participants to process the relatedness initially before memorizing each word pair. Participants were instructed to try to remember which words were presented together and were told that above each word pair was a label that would inform them as to whether or not the words within each pair were related.
All stimuli were presented in black font on a white background. For cued recall, participants were then shown the left word of each pair and were asked to verbally report the word with which it was originally paired whilst their voice was digitally recorded. This indicated if the cue was originally a member of a related or unrelated pair.
Participants were made specifically aware of this test format before encoding. There was a ms interval in between each word. Participants completed practice tests before each support condition to ensure that they were fully familiar with the procedure the practice tests were presented in the same format as the condition to which they corresponded. Each participant received the three support conditions in different orders, resulting in six different possible test orders, which were counterbalanced across participants.
Young and older adults made similar numbers of intrusions when there were labels at retrieval, but young adults made more intrusions in the other conditions.
0コメント