Memory, thinking and language.pdf

future plans. Memory is rarely a passive recall of events. Active
memory is all to do with reminding, both of past and future
events. The crucial issue is to explain why particular memories
are activated in order to make sense of current experiences.
Elaborate knowledge structures of categories and concepts are
useless if relevant knowledge cannot be retrieved and used If I
see a dog in a restaurant, I might start wondering if dogs are
usually allowed in, or perhaps be reminded that exceptions are
made for a guide dog for a blind person. Knowledge that a dog is
an animal and can breathe is unlikely to spring to my mind; the
connection between dogs and fleas might!
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Schema and frame representations
One general theory which has had a great deal of influence on
models of how knowledge is used to guide interpretations of
objects and events is schema theory. The basic idea, originally
suggested by Bartlett (1932), is that human memory consists of
high-level mental representations known as schemas, each of
which encapsulates knowledge about everything connected with
a class of objects or events. This notion has been taken up and
expanded to cover many different situations. Examples are
schemas for actions, like riding a bicycle, schemas for events,
like going to a restaurant, schemas for situations, like working in
an office, schemas for categories, like birds or mammals. In his
1932 book Remembering Bartlett was concerned with the role of
schemas in influencing interpretations which are later recorded
in memory. Discussing people’s repeated memories of his
famous ‘War of the Ghosts’ story, Bartlett made the point that, not
only did they originally construe this rather bizarre Red Indian
story to fit in with their own ideas of human relationships, but
that this process continued to affect their later memories.
Certainly many years after I first read the ‘War of the Ghosts’ as
an undergraduate, my truncated memory of it included many of
the points quoted by Bartlett.
Bartlett’s explanation was that new inputs like the ‘War of the
Ghosts’ story are incorporated into old schemas representing
knowledge about the kinds of things that are likely to happen in
folk tales. Schemas thus play a dual role: they represent general
knowledge of objects and events and at the same time they guide
the interpretation of newly occurring experiences which are