In this case, we have created a prototype of an ideal holiday on a beach, rather than a schema which reflects true details of it. The traits of such prototypical schemas, with which we can all identify, can be found amongst characters in stories across different cultures and eras Jung, Activities and specific occasions often follow a particular schedule of events.
We know that a wedding tends to involve a ceremony, followed by a celebratory meal and reception, whilst a commute to work might involve leaving the house, walking to the bus stop, paying the bus driver and taking a seat until you arrive outside your office. Unanticipated interruptions to this script tend to be unexpected, and can cause distress - e. People tend to hold common expectations of how a person in a particular role should behave.
Aside from a particular uniform, we anticipate that particular roles should be carried out by people with specific personality traits. For example, many people would expect a priest or vicar to be somewhat introverted - a calm figure who is quietly spoken - yet these traits are not necessitated by the role of a vicar.
Instead, it is the role schema which defines our expectations. Self schemas refer to the way in which we perceive ourselves. If we hold a self schema that describes an ambitious person, our behavior will be adjusted to aspire towards that schema - we might take more risks and expect to be successful, whilst a self schema depicting a timid person might lead us to take the back seat in large groups and avoid confrontations.
By adjusting our self schema we can alter the self-expectations of our own behavior. Which Archetype Are You? Discover which Jungian Archetype your personality matches with this archetype test. Are You Angry? Take our 5-minute anger test to find out if you're angry! Windows to the Soul What can a person's eyes tell you about what they are thinking?
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Why do we forget information? Find out in this fascinating article exploring What is conditioning? What Pavlov's dogs experiment teaches us about how we Explanation of the Zeigarnik effect, whereby interruption of a task can lead to More on Memory Psychology.
Psychology approaches, theories and studies explained. On day 2, allowing for some consolidation of the schema, subjects took part in the learning session. This entailed learning 72 associations of faces with homes. Half of the associations were congruent with the schema; the other half was random. After the learning session, subjects were prepared for EEG recording. In the ensuing test phase, recognition memory for both the schema-congruent and the schema-incongruent faces was assessed under EEG recording.
Finally, context memory was assessed by asking subjects to pick the location of the home that belonged to the face in the learning phase. Grayscale pictures of emotionally neutral faces were created using Faces TM software Biometrix, The faces varied on several non-critical features. However, three systematically manipulated, binary features occurred in each face: faces were either: 1 young adult or aged; 2 slender or stout and had either; 3 headwear caps, hats or headbands or no headwear.
These critical facial features could come in various forms e. Six out of the eight possible three-way combinations of these features were selected for use in the experiment.
Each of these six face categories was thus characterized by a unique combination of three critical features. However, for each face category just 2 out of the 3 critical features sufficed to distinguish that category; this 2-feature combination did not occur in any other category this circumstance is intrinsic to the systematic counterbalancing of critical features during item construction.
For each of these six face categories 24 faces were created. Twelve faces from each category 72 in total were used in the learning phase. With photo-editing software Adobe Photoshop , these 72 faces were slightly modified to create 72 additional lure faces changes mainly involved the size and shape of the eyes, nose and mouth. Finally, 24 extra faces four from each category were created with Faces TM software to serve as practice faces for day 1, and another 10 from various categories served as examples.
Figure 1. Example of a schema. Subjects were asked to memorize a schema such as this one before the start of the practice session on day 1. The schema taught them that a certain type of faces was always connected to the same home. The castle and the church also had a certain type of faces coupled to them.
The figure shows six faces that could be coupled to the caravan all stout and no headwear. Note that although all face examples are from the same face category, they are perceptually quite different.
Line drawings six in total of a house, church, factory, tent, castle and caravan were created such that face-home associations could be made. Thus, only for three homes, the associated faces could be predicted from the schema: the unique combination of two facial features that occurred in a particular face category fully determined with which home it was paired.
The assignment of homes and face categories to either the schema-congruent or schema-incongruent condition was semi-randomized across subjects. After arriving at the lab, subjects received a sheet of paper with the schema and were asked to memorize it. They were informed that the schema would greatly aid in connecting the faces to the homes in an upcoming memory task and that they should use the schema whenever possible.
The practice phase followed, in which subjects had to associate 24 faces, 12 schema-congruent and 12 schema-incongruent ones, with their corresponding homes in two encoding-retrieval cycles. During an encoding block, each of the 24 faces was presented for 1 s over a mid-screen fixation cross, then moved to one of the six homes that were organized hexagonally around the fixation cross, and stayed there for another 1. Immediately after each encoding block, a retrieval block followed, in which subjects were instructed to indicate the correct home for each face.
Faces were presented sequentially, for 2 s each, over the fixation cross. Subjects used a joystick to move the cursor from the fixation cross to the selected home and confirmed their choice with a button press.
In the first retrieval block, subjects received feedback on each placement: if the correct home was chosen, the home turned green, and the face moved to that location; if an incorrect location was chosen, the home turned red, and the correct home turned green see Figure 2B.
Subsequently, the subject had to make a movement to the correct home, after which the face moved to that home. The order of the faces was randomized over blocks and over subjects. Figure 2. Screen shots from the learning phase of the face-to-home association task. A Encoding phase: subjects observed the faces moving to their corresponding home. B Retrieval phase with feedback: subjects were asked to select the home that was associated with the face. Feedback was provided by presenting the wrong home in red, and subsequently the correct home in green.
C Retrieval phase with confidence rating: subjects were asked to select the home corresponding to the face and to make a confidence judgment thereafter. The small pink circle is the cursor that the subjects had to move to make their choice.
Importantly, there was no systematic relation between homes and screen locations. However, for a particular face-home association the home always appeared on the same location. Hence, the location of the home can be seen as a contextual aspect to the more central face-home association that could be implicitly learned during the task.
At the end of the practice session, subjects needed to have a good understanding of the task layout. Subjects who did not pick the correct homes for at least 9 out of 12 schema-congruent faces and 6 out of 12 incongruent faces were excluded from the experiment. We reasoned that subjects who did not meet this criterion did not have a good understanding of the task, which required switching between schema and non-schema strategies in order to obtain maximum performance.
Upon arrival at the lab subjects were instructed to learn 72 new face-home associations. They were asked to use, where possible, the previously learned schema for connecting the 72 new faces with their corresponding homes.
Three encoding-retrieval cycles followed; the first two included feedback, while the third included confidence rating instead of feedback. After a 10 min break, subjects were prepared for EEG recording, which took approximately 1 h.
Thereafter they performed a 30 min surprise face recognition test, under EEG recording. During face recognition, the 72 faces from the learning phase, 72 lure faces and 72 new faces were presented, intermingled.
For this task, faces were presented sequentially, in the middle of the screen, for ms each. Subjects were instructed to use buttons on the joystick to answer the question within the 3 s interval. If subjects did not respond within the allotted time interval an omission was scored. After those 3 s, subjects made a confidence judgment self-paced.
After a short break, subjects performed the contextual memory task, which required them to pick the location of the home that corresponded to each face. As mentioned briefly before, the location of the home can be seen as a contextual aspect to the more central face-home association that could be implicitly learned during the task. Each of the 72 learned faces was shown for 2 s in the middle of the screen, which also showed a hexagonal pattern of six gray circles, reflecting the positions of the homes during learning.
Subjects responded by selecting one of the gray circles with the cursor, after which confidence was rated. This contextual memory task was self-paced and lasted approximately 10 min. Finally, a questionnaire was administered to assess whether subjects intentionally encoded the locations of the homes along with the face-home associations during encoding. In the current experiment, the location is intended as contextual to the more central face-home association. Break periods were manually removed from the continuous filtered EEG high pass filter: 0.
Independent Component Analysis ICA was used to remove eye blinks, eye movements, and other noise components from the continuous EEG data noise rejection was based on criteria published by the NBT: www. This resulted in four conditions of interest: schema-congruent old faces, schema-congruent new faces, schema-incongruent old faces and schema-incongruent new faces. Please note that lure faces were not used for the EEG analyses, but were included for behavioral analyses only.
Per subject, EEG data was first averaged across trials in a condition, and then averaged across the five electrodes in a ROI. Finally, a single mean amplitude was calculated, by averaging across the time points within our time window of interest — ms; Woodruff et al. As we were interested in studying the neural correlates of a potential schema effect, data from subjects that did not show the schema manipulation in their behavioral responses was excluded, in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
To quantify the schema effect on an individual basis, we first summed the correct identification scores of old and lure faces for each schema condition separately. Next, the summed score in the schema-congruent condition was subtracted from the summed score in the schema-incongruent condition. Thirty-six subjects had positive difference scores whereas a mere six showed either no difference or a negative difference score.
These six subjects were excluded from the EEG analysis. As the behavioral data was largely non-normally distributed, Wilcoxon Paired Signed Rank tests were used to compare the schema-congruent and schema-incongruent conditions.
As there were 36 faces in each condition, this was always the maximum score. During the learning phase, subjects could make use of the schema to connect the schema-congruent faces to their homes. As performance was much higher in the schema-congruent condition, this convincingly shows that subjects used the schema to their advantage.
Table 1. Average response frequencies for old, similar and new images, in the schema-congruent and schema-incongruent conditions. Together, these findings clearly show that memory discriminability for schema-congruent items was markedly inferior to memory for schema-incongruent items. To test the hypothesis that the use of a schema leads to contextually impoverished memories, we tested whether subjects could remember where the homes were located during the encoding session.
Moreover, in the incongruent condition, confidence was higher schema-incongruent mean : 3. The questionnaire results revealed that a few subjects intentionally encoded the location of the faces during encoding, even if only for some faces.
The combined behavioral results thus show a clear memory disadvantage for schema-congruent items. This is apparent for recognition memory of the target items faces and even more so for schema-irrelevant contextual information. Memory performance suggests that retrieval of schema-incongruent items might involve more recollection i.
We first investigated whether there were differences in the average ERP amplitudes — ms time window for the schema-congruent new and the schema-incongruent new condition. Figure 3. A Line graphs show average ERP waveforms for the schema-incongruent, schema-congruent and new condition, for the left upper part and right lower part parietal ROI.
Bar graphs on the right show ERP amplitudes averaged across this time window, for each condition. B Topographic maps of amplitude differences between the congruent old vs. These findings support the notion that schema-incongruent memories were contextually richer than schema-congruent memories. Such a correlation would strengthen the notion that the ERP effects described in the previous section indeed reflect differences between conditions with regard to contextual memory retrieval.
We correlated the average ERP amplitudes in the schema-incongruent old and schema-congruent old condition with the contextual memory scores i. Figure 4. The present study set out to test whether schemas induce shallow encoding of goal-irrelevant information. The results confirm our hypothesis: both item and context memory accuracy were strongly reduced in the schema-congruent condition. Moreover, recollection-related ERP amplitudes were larger for the schema-incongruent condition as compared to the schema-congruent condition, further supporting the hypothesis that memories for schema-congruent items are contextually impoverished.
In the present paradigm, each face stimulus was presented multiple times during the learning phase, and some level of attention to the face was always needed to select the corresponding home. These paradigm characteristics, considering also the fast processing of face stimuli by our brain Itier and Taylor, ; Pegna et al. Still, large differences were observed between memory for the schema-congruent and schema-incongruent faces. In the face recognition test, the schema-congruent faces were less likely to be recognized, and were more often falsely endorsed as new.
With regard to memory for contextual aspects of the learning episode, the difference between the schema conditions was even higher. It thus appears that the use of schemas strongly impairs memory formation, which is intriguing given the ample opportunity subjects had to form strong memory traces.
The ERP results provide further support for differences in memory quality between the schema conditions. This ERP effect is generally most pronounced over parietal electrode sites and may be left lateralized Schloerscheidt and Rugg, ; Wilding, ; Finnigan et al.
In the present study, the schema-congruent faces elicited a left-lateralized ERP effect, whereas the effect was bilateral in the schema-incongruent condition. Indeed, in the right parietal region the schema-incongruent ERP amplitude was significantly higher than the schema-congruent one.
We like to speculate that this difference reflects the stronger recollection in the schema-incongruent condition. This notion is strengthened by the positive correlation between average ERP amplitude in the schema-incongruent old condition, especially on the right side, and the availability of spatial context memory. In fact, as spatial information processing tends to be largely lateralized to the right hemisphere Smith et al.
The current findings extend previous work from our lab that showed poor memory for visual details when regularities can be extracted across the material to be learned Sweegers and Talamini, In that study, the negative influence on storage of arbitrary schema-irrelevant stimulus aspects may have been related to the process of regularity extraction.
We now show that such negative effects on memory encoding also occur when a pre-established schema is used. Thus, at least part of the effect is related to schema use, rather than schema formation.
We, moreover, now show that such regularities, or schemas, also impair context memory retrieval, and that this is evidenced by changes in the underlying neural networks. So how do schemas exert these negative effects on memory formation?
In the present study, schemas appeared to particularly alter memory processing during the encoding phase, as poor memory for schema-items was already evident shortly after learning. This was also the case in our previous study Sweegers and Talamini, , which, in addition, showed similar retention of visual detail for schema-congruent and incongruent items during a 4 h post-encoding interval.
According to his theory of cognitive development , children go through a series of stages of intellectual growth. In Piaget's theory , a schema is both the category of knowledge as well as the process of acquiring that knowledge.
He believed that people are constantly adapting to the environment as they take in new information and learn new things. As experiences happen and new information is presented, new schemas are developed and old schemas are changed or modified. For example, a young child may first develop a schema for a horse. She knows that a horse is large, has hair, four legs, and a tail. When the little girl encounters a cow for the first time, she might initially call it a horse. After all, it fits in with her schema for the characteristics of a horse; it is a large animal that has hair, four legs, and a tail.
Once she is told that this is a different animal called a cow, she will modify her existing schema for a horse and create a new schema for a cow. Now, let's imagine that this girl encounters a miniature horse for the first time and mistakenly identifies it as a dog.
Her parents explain to her that the animal is actually a very small type of horse, so the little girl must at this time modify her existing schema for horses. She now realizes that while some horses are very large animals, others can be very small.
Through her new experiences, her existing schemas are modified and new information is learned. While Piaget focused on childhood development, schemas are something that all people possess and continue to form and change throughout life. Object schemas are just one type of schema that focuses on what an inanimate object is and how it works. For example, most people in industrialized nations have a schema for what a car is. Your overall schema for a car might include subcategories for different types of automobiles such as a compact car, sedan, or sports car.
Other types of schemas that people often possess include:. The processes through which schemas are adjusted or changed are known as assimilation and accommodation. In assimilation , new information is incorporated into pre-existing schemas. Schemas tend to be easier to change during childhood but can become increasingly rigid and difficult to modify as people grow older. Schemas will often persist even when people are presented with evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
In many cases, people will only begin to slowly change their schemas when inundated with a continual barrage of evidence pointing to the need to modify it. Schemas also play a role in the learning process. For example:. While the use of schemas to learn, in most situations, occurs automatically or with little effort, sometimes an existing schema can hinder the learning of new information. Prejudice is one example of a schema that prevents people from seeing the world as it is and inhibits them from taking in new information.
By holding certain beliefs about a particular group of people, this existing schema may cause people to interpret situations incorrectly. When an event happens that challenges these existing beliefs, people may come up with alternative explanations that uphold and support their existing schema instead of adapting or changing their beliefs. Consider how this might work for gender expectations and stereotypes. Everyone has a schema for what is considered masculine and feminine in their culture.
Such schemas can also lead to stereotypes about how we expect men and women to behave and the roles we expect them to fill.
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