Brewer and Treynes (1981)
Uses: Schema
Aim: To investigate the role of schema in memory
Method: True experiment
Procedure:
86 university psychology student
Called into a room.
Left in there for 35 seconds
It was made to look like an office, some items that you find in office such as typewriter, some you don't like skulls, and some purposely left out like books
They were left in there while being told that the experimenter is checking if the previous group have finished with the experiment.
After 35 seconds, they were asked if they think they will be asked to memorized the objects in the room, 93% said no.
30 participants carried out written recall and then verbal recognition; 29 participants carried out drawing recall; 27 carried out verbal recognition only.
Recall condition: asked to write down as many objects as they could remember from the office. Asked to state the location, shape, size, and colour. They were asked to "Write your description as if you were describing the room for someone who had never seen it." After this, they were given a recognition test in which they were given a booklet containing a list of objects. They were asked to rate each item for how sure they were that the object was in the room. "1" meant that they were sure it was not in the room; "6" meant that they were absolutely sure it was in the room. The questionnaire consisted of 131 objects: 61 were in the room; 70 were not.
The drawing condition: In this condition, participants were given an outline of the room and asked to draw in the objects they could remember.
The verbal recognition condition: In this condition, the participants were read a list of objects and simply asked whether they were in the room or not.
Result:
When writing down a paragraph or drawing the office, the participants were more likely to remember items in the office congruent with their schema. "expected items" were more often recalled. Non-congruent items like skulls were not often recalled.
When asked to identify the objects from a list, they were more likely to identify the incongruent objects like the skull. However, they also had a higher rate of identifying objects which are schema congruent but not in the room such as books.
In both the drawing and the recall condition, they also tended to change the nature of the objects to match their schema. For example, the pad of yellow paper that was on a chair was remembered as being on the desk. The trapezoidal work table was recalled as a square.
It appears that schema played a role in both the encoding and recall of the objects in the office.
Evaluation:
No way of verifying schema prior to experiment
Ethical concern, blind to the actual study, no debriefing, but needed for the study to work. Necessary to avoid demand characteristics
In recall condition, average amount of objects recalled correctly was 13.5 and the average of inferred objects recalled was 1.13. Book was the most common objects recalled that was not in the room (9/30). The results do not indicate a high number of errors and do not explain why some recalled these objects yet others did not.
Brewer, W. F., & Treyens, J. C. (1981). Role of schemata in memory for places. Cognitive Psychology, 13(2), 207–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(81)90008-6