![]() This example is to demonstrate that our cultural upbringing can forge our belief systems and, specifically in this instance, the expectations of what we consider to be pro-social behavior. An American citizen (from a culture where tipping is not only a nice thing to do but expected behavior) visiting Japan could mistakenly tip a Japanese waiter, and in the process, not only offend him, but violate the waiter’s schema of “proper restaurant etiquette.” The American citizen (operating according to his own cultural schema), would believe they had done nothing wrong, and justify his offense by referring to the collection of memories he has in American restaurants, where tipping was continuously proven to be an act of courteousness and respect. In Japanese culture for instance, it is extremely offensive to tip waiters and waitresses. A moment when this could occur, for example, is when a non-native is visiting a new country that has its own unique customs and social norms. However, not all schemas are universally accepted, and in fact, schemas often have discrepancies between individuals. These characteristics have been displayed in most of our prior interactions with dogs, and therefore, help us to form a shared, concrete, and uncontroversial schema of what “dog” is. For example, humans share a common schema surrounding the concept of “dog,” which works something like this: animal, four legs, barks, wags tail, has fur, etc. This organizational process is implicit and permeates all objects of our conscious experience. The aggregate effect of all these influences working simultaneously is the formation of a schema a mental framework that organizes information by their perceived relationships and associations. The content of people’s memories is greatly influenced by a collection of underlying personal beliefs, social pressures, biases and heuristics, and cultural assumptions 3-6. In addition, it was also noticed that many of our participant’s responses included common false memories that were shared between them, indicating the emergence of similar, underlying cultural assumptions that influenced the content of their memories. Furthermore, the average number of “false memories” found within participant’s responses greatly increased for both stories during the second recall (Incan - 62%, American - 55%). When compared to the immediate recall in both stories (M = 12.7, SE = 0.83), the precision of participant’s responses significantly decreased when recalled one week later (M = 6.9, SE = 0.70), F(1, 19) = 110.97, p <. ![]() Memory accuracy was operationalized by categorizing story structure into ten distinct elements that were shown to occur in both narratives. ![]() This same request was asked of the participants one week later to analyze the effect of time on both memory recall and accuracy. Participants were read the stories one at a time by the researcher and were then asked to recall the content of the stories directly afterwards. The experiment utilized two different stories of distinct cultural origins (one being a brief synopsis of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five the other an ancient tale from Incan mythology titled “The Incan Goddess of Childbirth) that acted as the objects for memorization. The current research attempted to recapitulate this idea using Frederick Bartlett’s model of reconstructive memory 2 to further investigate the reliability of human memory. This is exactly the reason why there can be multiple interpretations of a single event when discussed between individuals. Instead, these internal representations have gaps, and therefore, must be reconstructed. It would not be necessarily true to state that people “recall” memories, as past experiences remembered in the present are never concrete reproductions of their original structure. The content of one’s memories is evidence of these adaptations. As Jean Piaget noted, 1 the acquisition of knowledge is not a stagnant or fixed process, but a series of continuous adaptations to new information that can fit our environmental or cultural expectations. ![]() Two questions necessarily follow this fact: what exactly makes something worth remembering, and how much of that thing is actually being remembered? One factor that influences this process is the knowledge we gain through experience, as it is our experiences that inform what we should attend to, what we value, and that shape our conditioned patterns of thinking. It cannot store an unlimited amount of information, and because of this limitation, evolved to remember only what it deems relevant to the moment. Our memory system is, in a sense, defined through its shortcomings. Although it is self-evident that one’s memories are often fleeting, a large amount of empirical research has been done within the field of cognitive psychology supporting the notion that one of the mind’s most extensive faults is its faculty for memory.
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