Bartlett (1932) Study
Aim: To investigate the effects of schemes on participants recall. Schemas include prior expectations, attitudes, prejudices, and stereotypes.
Procedures: 20 English participants took part in the experiment. They were shown a range of stimuli including different stories and line drawings. A repeated reproduction method was used as participants were asked to reproduce the stimulus they had seen repeatedly at different time intervals.
The story was from another culture and conflicted with the English participants schemas.
Their final stories were then analyzed to assess the distortions.
Findings: He found considerable distortions in the recollections. These reflected attempts from the participants to make them fit in with their own culture. He found a failure to recall unfamiliar details and elaboration of certain content. The changes made the story easier to remember.
Conclusions: Bartlett concluded that the accuracy of memory is low. The participants were actively reconstructing the story to fit their existing schemas, so his schema theory was supported.
He also concluded that memory was forever being reconstructed because each reproduction showed more changes.
Criticisms: Some of the first evidence that what we remember depends on our prior knowledge in the form of schemas.
Higher ecological validity because schemas play a role in everyday memory.
He presumed that distortions in recall were due to genuine problems with memory, however his instructions were vague.
Bartlett assumed that schemas influence what happens at the time of retrieval but no effect on what happens at the time of comprehension of a story. Other sources suggest they have an impact at encoding, storage and retrieval.
