Schema and deviation effects in remembering repeated unfamiliar stories

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 1 month, 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.

Facilitating recall and particularisation of repeated events in adults using a multi-method interviewing format

“…free recall format), yet recall did not further benefit from the presence of deviations. The current results are inconsistent with previous research, which shows that the presence of deviations facilitates recall for all the witnessed events and for the targeted instance itself (Connolly et al, 2016;MacLean et al, 2018; although see Rubínová et al, 2021). Also, witnessing an instance that deviated from the script did not facilitate source monitoring as participants reported a similar number of internal intrusions in both deviation conditions.…”

Repeated recall of repeated events: Accuracy and consistency.

“…In Study 1, our aim was to create stimuli that would resemble reallife repeated events in order to increase external validity relative to other laboratory-based repeated event studies (e.g., MacLean et al, 2018;Rubínová et al, 2020Rubínová et al, , 2021. Inspired by developmental repeated-event studies where children are typically interviewed about instances in which they directly participated (e.g., play sessions; Farrar & Boyer-Pennington, 1999), we created a series of marketing-themed visits that would be engaging for our target sample of adults.…”

The Influence of Schematic Knowledge Differences on Memory Recall: How Do Different Cultural Backgrounds Impact Memory Recognition

“…In brief, participants showed a gradual increase of accuracy of recall as the examples of stories go, which demonstrated that there was a build-up schema formation of the unfamiliar stories and helped us consolidate our memory formation as well. Besides, there were few memory errors of deviation from the original story shown than when it was tested with familiar stories [2]. In this case, it suggested that the build-up of new schema took over more of the attention when remembering events.…”

“…In addition, schematic knowledge is not something that we are born inert. Rather, it is a build-up information that we developed and establish through our experiences in life, and thus sometimes it may change and deviates as time goes [2].…”