Result, Methods, And Intro Essays - Mental Processes, Memory, Schema

Result, Methods, And Intro 12/8/00 Introduction, Methods, and Results Memory Recall Adianice Correa Memory Recall There are many questions to how people process information. Many have understood that people remember and learn components of a passage more easily when particular elements of the passage are subjectively considered to be important than when it's not. Systems such as story schemata produce organized descriptions of the substance of a text. Thus, drawing attention to particular parts of a story. However, there is no definite answer as to what makes such element s important, and therefore making such components become easily retrieved. This paper will list possible explanations for what makes specific text important. Findings from prior research give special consideration to evidence that seem to maintain dissimilarities between encoding and retrieval. The schemata theory has been used for the present experiment. In this theory, components of a schemata are slots or variables which may be defined as events or elements that are remembered better because there is a structure or framework laid down beforehand. Such theories, which try to explain how schemas work are recognized as the ?attention-directing theory? or the ?slot theory.? Schema theory provides an instant annotation on the dominance in the recollection of important information. In the ?attention-directing? hypothesis the schema singles out important elements. Therefore, more attention is devoted to these elements than to less important ones, and so they more likely to be learned. Another hypothesis is the ?ideational scaffolding? hypothesis in which the schema is most likely going to contain a slot for important text elements where the information gets stored specifically because there is a function for it. Ways of processing information are based upon individual differences, in which there may or may not be slots for both important and unimportant elements. Several investigators (Bower, 1977; Mandler Pichert & Anderson, 1977) have contemplated that a schema might provide a retrieval arrangement. The idea is that memory search comes from the generic knowledge integrated in the schema to the particular information stored when the text was read. A second possibility is that schemata guide ?output editing.? This would require suggesting that a schema includes within itself an indicator of significance, which in conjunction with the demand characteristics of the recall causes the person to establish a response condition. A final possible retrieval process is ?inferential reconstruction? (Spiro, 1977). Suppose that a participant was attempting to recall a story about going to a movie theatre. He or she might not remember whether popcorn had been eaten, but since there is a slot in his or her schema for popcorn being eaten during movie- watching. And so, the popcorn may be reconstructed, and assumes that soda was a most likely beverage to be drunk during the move session, being produced as a plausible guess. Therefore, the abstract apparatus of the schema will be biased toward reconstructing important elements. There is a repeated finding that important elements persist to emerge in recall code of behavior after a retention period, whereas the appearance of unimportant elements decreases overwhelmingly (cf. Bower, 1976; Newman, 1939). In the present study, college students were read stories from either of two directed perspectives or from no directed perspective. The passage had to do with a subject named Spike, who was trying to get out of a situation, being bound and had been accused of doing something wrong. The situation was described to be in a closed tight space with a confinement description of his surroundings. Different groups rated the importance of the elements in the story from three points of view: the viewpoint of wrestler, the viewpoint of a convict, or a non- directional perspective. The purpose of the experiment described in this paper was to attempt to offer a foundation for the process in text recall of retrieval methods separate from storage mechanisms. Within a schema framework, it can be argued that people may store information when reading a text, which they fail to produce when recalling that same information. After the subjects had been read the Spike passage, all attempted to recall the story after being presented with a distraction test. One third of the subjects were directed to one perspective, that is, from wrestler, to convict, to a