classic and contemporary studies

• CONTEMPORARY STUDY: Steyvers and Hemmer 2012 aim

  To investigate episodic and semantic memory in a naturalistic way
• Steyvers and Hemmer 2012: procedure


  condition 1

  Assessed prior knowledge . The first group of participants ( verbal cue condition) were asked to list all the objects they would expect to find in the five scenes; kitchen, office, dining room, hotel room, urban scene. Researchers then selected five images and participants ( visual scene condition) and were asked to name all the objects in the image
• Steyvers and Hemmer 2012: procedure

  condition 2

  Was a memory experiment using two of the images from each scene type and these participants saw each image for either a short 2 seconds or long 10 seconds duration. The participants carried out a short distractor task after each scene and then listed all the objects they could recall seeing in any order
• Steyvers and Hemmer 2012: findings

  Results of condition 1 :

  Objects were named more frequently that are central and important for eg. car in urban scene 20/22 people named

  people have strong prior expectations

  Results from condition 2:

  error rates low for expected objects- 9%

  error rates for low probability objects was 18%

  which these both show good recall and use of prior knowledge
• Steyvers and Hemmer 2012: generalisability

  Used university students in a western society which may not be generalisable to the way prior expectation affects schema cross-culturally
• Steyvers and Hemmer 2012: validity

  Study had a high degree of realism as work incorporated prior knwledge which is used in real life memory so it can be argued that they were studying real life memory however is still a lab experiment which does control variables.
• steyvers and Hemmer 2012: application


  These findings can be applied to improving the accuracy of EWT, prior knowledge should be encouraged with eyewitnesses rather than filling in information with schemas