The effect of social or cultural factors on one cognitive process is the effect of schema on memory free essay sample

An example of the effect of social or cultural factors on one cognitive process is the effect of schema on memory. Schemas are mental representations of categories from our knowledge, expectations, and beliefs. Any information that people are exposed to is affected by the society and culture that they are in, and schemas are influenced by external factors, which then affects what’s stored in our memory process. Our memory content opens a window through which we can observe the cultural influences on the ways in which individuals attend to represent, organize, retrieve, and share events, and that is what we will be observing throughout this essay. A significant researcher into schemas is Bartlett (1932). He introduced the idea of schemas in his study called â€Å"War of Ghosts†. His aim was to investigate the effect of culture on memory. He had the participants (all from an english background) read a Native American folktale and then recall it later. We will write a custom essay sample on The effect of social or cultural factors on one cognitive process is the effect of schema on memory or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page As for the results, the story was changed, there were no odd or supernatural things added into the stories that the people re-wrote, it was a straightforward story of a fight and death. This story relates to the effect of culture on memory because Bartlett’s work demonstrated how schemas originating in one particular culture is re-called. His participants relied on schematic knowledge, acquired within their culture to understand and later recall a story from a different culture. Memory is very inaccurate, Bartlett’s study helped to explain through the understanding of schemas when people remember stories, they typically omit some details, and introduce rationalisations and distortions, because they reconstruct the story so as to make more sense in terms of their knowledge, the culture in which they were brought up in and experiences in the form of schemas. A further study demonstrating cultural influence on schematic knowledge is by Rogoff and Wadell (1982). The aim was to determine whether non-western children would show a memory defect for contextually organised spatial material. They gave Guatemalan children a memory task that was meaningful in local terms; constructed a diorama of a Mayan village located near a mountain and a lake, similar to the locale in which the children lived. Each child watched as a local experimenter selected 20 miniature objects from a set of 80 and placed them in the diorama, object included were: cars, animals, people, and furniture. Then the 20 objects were returned to the group of 60 others remaining on the table. After a few minutes, the children were asked to reconstruct the full scene they had been show. Under these conditions, the memory performance of the Mayan children was slightly superior to that of their United States counterparts. This study supports that culture affects memory, Culture heavily impacts schema, thus memory recall. Through this study, it shows that people can remember better or perform tasks which are recognized as part of their culture, due to cultural influences and experiences stored in their schemas. The studies established, in particular Bartlett’s work, showed that memory is, to a significant extent, a construction; moreover, one that relies heavily on the schemas we develop in our cultural settings. And as demonstrated in these two studies, cultural factors stored in our schemas affect our memory and how we recall things. Therefore, human cognition is culturally independent, in the way that cognitive abilities are influenced by the social and cultural context in which people live.