Explain one study into schema theory [8 marks]

Schemas are mental representations of cognitive structures that organise the information stored in our memory. They are knowledge structures that categorise general knowledge about the world.

In Anderson and Pitchers study into schema theory, participants were asked to listen to a story about a house. They were each given a schema: a house-buyer; or burglar. This means that they were to take on the role of their respective schema while listening to the story. Within the story, there were 72 points or items listed (e.g. a rare coin collection, the house being empty on Thursdays, a leaky roof).  After the participants listened to the story, they performed a distracting task. They then were asked to recall the story. The participants then waited for 5 minutes before recalling the story again. This time, half of the participants were asked to tell the story from the schema that they were set originally, while the other half were asked to recall the story from the alternative point of view. 

The results of the experiment showed that participants that were asked to switch schema groups recalled an average of 7% more points than the first recall, while recall of points linked to the new schemas increased by about 10%. However, the rate at which participants were able to recall their previous schema dropped significantly. In addition to this, the participants that did not switch schema groups recalled less than they did in the first test. This is thought to be due to the general propensity of people to encode information that is irrelevant towards their schema, ultimately showing that our schemas are not always reliable due to external influences. This study shows that schemas affect both the encoding and the retrieval stages of memory, as the change in schema influenced the performance in recalling information.