Evaluating Schema Theory

Evaluate schema theory

Schemas are mental representations of knowledge and understanding that is stored in our brain based on past experiences, beliefs, expectations about people, events, objects, situations or anything else that surrounds us. Schema theory, on the other hand, defines the cognitive process of processing and organizing information that we perceive from the outside world which then is stored in different categories in memory. Since people access information actively and nothing we store is perfectly set, we often interpret what’s going around us based on what we already know, thus a relationship is drawn between people’s mental representations and the way how they think and absorb new information. However, because it is still

According to Bartlett, schemas influence memory in that they lead to distortion of it also known as reconstructive memory. He suggested that sociocultural factors that are present in the environment that we live in affect the way how we process information because of the way that we were brought up and the social norms that we follow currently. This is also known as the concept of cultural schema which has been further investigated in memory research in terms of how shared experiences of of a cultural group influence memory and schemas of how we view the world and identify things around us. Bartlett conducted the study “War of Ghosts”, aiming to investigate whether people’s remembrance of a story is affected by pre-existing screams and the extent to which memory is reconstructive. In the experiment, British participants were supposed to hear a Native American legend (“War of Ghosts”), and then recall it after some time. The results showed that participants could remember the gist of the story but not the details of it. When retelling the story, participants

It provides an explanation about the distortion of memory and the fact that we store information in our brains, but it’s unclear and lacks explanation on how we do that. Therefore, the concept of schemas is sometimes considered vague due to the fact that it’s still unknown how schemas are acquired. In spite of all of these, schema theory is very useful because it helps us understand how our brain processes information and how we use our brains to make sense of the