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In this essay I will explain how Schank & Abelson’s (1977) notion of schema helps us
to understand the accuracies and inaccuracies of episodic memory. ...
I will then show how schema can produce false memory and its importance in
eye-witness testimony. ...
Scripts are memory representations for often performed action sequences, and these
sequences are casually linked. ...
Instead of having to remember all the details of each new person, object or event we
encounter, we can simply note that it is like a schema already in our memory and
encode and remember only its most distinctive features. ...
Thus, an activity represented in memory by a strong script is one in which people
have a clear and distinct expectation about the appropriate order in which to perform
the action sequence, or follow the script. ...
That is, something distinctive (atypical for that script or schema) sticks out, but over
time the distinction wears off and the memory becomes more consistent with the
script or schema for that type of event.
This brings me to one of my first criticisms which the schema theory evokes: which
is that an object or event can be distorted if the schema used to encode it does not fit
well ( Atkinson& Hilgard, 2003)
Bartlett (1932) was the first to systematically study these effects of schemas on
memory.
He suggested that memory distortions can occur when we attempt to fit stories into
schema’s. ...
Later studies confirmed Bartlett’s suggestion that false memory can occur when
unfamiliar events are placed into existing schemas, which are closest to the event
or the most logical to them. For example, after reading a brief story about a
character going to a restaurant, people are likely to recall statements about the
character eating and paying for a meal, even though those actions were never
mentioned in the story (Bower, Black, & Turner, 1979)
Now having mentioned the harmless memory as stated above it doesn’t seem like a
drastic event; someone remembering that a fictional person paid a meal in a
restaurant when it didn’t actually occur.
Approximate Word count = 1398
Approximate Pages = 5.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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