IA

French and Richards (1993)

Clock Experiment

Schema Theory, a principle which defines cognitive level of analysis is that “cognitive processes are influenced by social and cultural factors”. Frederic Barltlett came up with the term schema which he defined as a mental representation of knowledge. An experiment he did showed that people had trouble remembering a story from another culture and they reconstructed the story to fit in with their own cultural schemas. With this he showed that memory is not like a recorder but rather when a memory makes sense to them and has meaning they are more likely to remember it. Also, Barlett claims this is why memory is subject to distortions.

            French and Richards (1993) performed an experiment based on this theory. They wanted to investigate if schema theory affected short term memory. Their experiment consisted of having three conditions these were:

• First Condition : In this condition participants were shown a clock with roman numerals and asked to draw the clock from memory
• Second Condition: This condition participants were shown the same clock, except the participants were told before hand that they would have to draw the clock from memory
• Third Condition: Third condition was left with a fullview on the clock and was asked to draw it.

The clock used represented the number four with IIII, not the conventional IV. For the first two conditions the clock was left on the board for 5-6 minutes before it was taken out. In the first two conditions, the majority of participants drew the number four in the conventional IV roman numerals. French and Richards explained this result in terms of schemata knowledge of roman numerials showing how it affects the memory of the participants. These results also show that even though the roman numeral IV was drawn instead of IIII it does not mean that the brain created a false memory but rather used the schema theory to fill in the gaps of knowledge as the conventional IV is better known than the IIII.