There are many social and cultural factors which affect cognitive processes. An example of one of these is the effect of schemas on memory. Schemas are cognitive structures that organise the knowledge stored in our memory. These are mental representations of categories from our beliefs, expectations and knowledge. Any information that our brain gathers about particular events, people and actions are all stored in a persons brain in the form of a schema. This relates to the essay question in that the information an individual is exposed to is affected by the society and culture they live in and therefore the individuals in different cultures will have different schemas as a result of the social and cultural difference. Schemas can be divided into three different …show more content…
Due to this researchers are able to observe how culture influences on the ways an individual organises, retrieves and shares information. There have been various studies conducted to try and understand this intricate process and the relationship between schemas, culture and society. In this essay I will be discussing two of theses studies. The first study is that of Bartlett conducted in 1932 ‘War Of The Ghosts”. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of culture on memory. This study used British students as their participants. These participants were presented with a Native American folk story titled “ The War Of The Ghosts”. They testes the participants memory of the story using serial reproduction and repeated reproduction. Serial reproduction is when the first participant reading the story writes it down on paper which then in turn is read by the second participants who then also reproduces it on paper and so on until the process has been repeated 6 or 7 times. Where as repeated reproduction is when the sam participant reproduces the story 6 or 7 times from their own previous reproductions. And so after