How Does Schemas Affect One Cognitive Process

In this essay I will be investigating the extent at which social or cultural factors affect one cognitive process. I decided to investigate on how schemas affect memory. Schemas would be the cultural factor and memory would be the cognitive process. Schemas are cognitive structures that organize the knowledge in our memory. They are mental representations gathering our knowledge, beliefs and expectations. The information that people are exposed to is affected by the social and cultural context they live on since every human being is exposed to different information, therefore they will have different schemas. This relates to the idea that it affects cognitive processes since schemas are influence by external factors (social and cultural aspects)

The aim of this study was to determine whether non-western children would show a memory defect for contextually organized spatial material. They followed the experiment by giving Guatemalan children a memory task that was significant for them (in local terms). The children had to construct a diorama of a Mayan village that was similar to where they lived. Then experimenters took away 20 selected miniature objects and after some time return them to each groups placing them in the diorama. After this, the children were asked to reconstruct the full scene they had been shown. This was then repeated to children from the united states which clearly weren’t familiar with Mayan cultures as the other children. The results showed that the Mayan children had superior results to their counterparts (united states). Therefore, this study links with the idea that culture affects memory since Guatemalan children could remember better than their counterparts. This shows that culture heavily impacts schema, thus memory recall. Through this study, it shows that people can remember and recognize better things that are part of their culture, due to cultural influences and experiences stored in their