Abstract
In today's globalized world, we frequently encounter unfamiliar events that we may have difficulty comprehending - and in turn remembering - due to a lack of appropriate schemata. This research investigated schema effects in a situation where participants established a complex new schema for an unfamiliar type of story through exposure to four variations. We found that immediate recall increased across subsequent stories and that distortions occurred less frequently - participants built on the emerging schema and gradually established representations of parts of the story that were initially transformed. In recall with delays increasing up to 1month, quantitative measures indicated forgetting while distortions increased. The second focus of this research was on content and order deviation effects on recall. The content deviation, in contrast with previous repeated-event research, was not remembered well and was associated with lower recall; the order deviation had a similar (but expected) effect. We discuss discrepancies between results of this study and previous literature, which had focused on schemata for familiar events, in relation to stages of schema development: it seems that in unfamiliar repeated events, a complex new schema is in the early stages of formation, where the lack of attentional resources limits active processing of deviations.
Highlights
Bartlett (1932) demonstrated that parts of an unfamiliar story may become distorted in the process of remembering
In one of Bartlett’s (1932) experiments, participants were presented with an adapted version of a North American folktale The War of the Ghosts, which started with the following line: ‘One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals. . .’
We presented participants with four versions of an unfamiliar story and asked them to recall each story shortly after its presentation, and again four more times with delays increasing from 10 min to 1 month
Summary
Bartlett (1932) demonstrated that parts of an unfamiliar story may become distorted in the process of remembering (see Bergman & Roediger, 1999; Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2000). We used a set of variations of an unfamiliar story in a repeated-event paradigm, and we followed participants’ recall using a method of repeated reproduction with increasing delay. This unique combination of methodologies enabled us to examine (1) schema formation for unfamiliar material and effects associated with cultural schemata as well as (2) phenomena specific for repeated events, such as accuracy of recall instances and effects of deviations. This process of conventionalization illustrates socio-cultural influences on remembering that involve assimilation of unfamiliar forms to familiar ones often through processes of rationalization, simplification, and social constructiveness that may result in distortion (Bartlett, 1932; Collins, 2006; Northway, 1940a, 1940b; Saito, 2000).
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