Chapter 6, page 72
TEXT 1. The stillness of the morning air was broken. Then men
headed down the bay.
Colleen: The men are going shopping. They’re going to buy
clothes at The Bay. That’s a shopping center... They’re going
shopping because it seems like they broke something.Commentary:Colleen has interpreted “the bay” to
mean a shopping center she is familiar
with, which was named The Bay.
TEXT 2. The net was hard to pull. The heavy sea and strong
tide made it even more difficult for the girdie. The meshed catch
encouraged us to try harder.
Colleen: I guess The Bay must have a big water fountain.
Interviewer: Why was the net hard to pull?
Colleen: There was a lot of force on the water....Colleen has activated a schema for
The Bay, and she continues to apply
this schema. She ignore information
that does not fit this schema, and she
distorts other information (treating the
“sea” as a water fountain) to make it
fit the schema for The Bay.
TEXT 3. With four quintels aboard, we were now ready to
leave. The skipper saw mares’ tails in the north.
Colleen: They were finished their shopping and were ready to go
home....
Interviewer: Why were they worried about the mares’ tails?
Colleen: There were a group of horses on the street, and they
wouldn’t move and the men were afraid they would attack the car....
In reading Text 3, she again ignores
material that did not fit her mall
schema. When pressed by the
interviewer, she interpreted some
words she didn’t know into something
that would at least make some sense
in a mall setting.TEXT 4. We tied up to the wharf. We hastily grabbed our
prongs and set to work. The catch was left in the stage while we
had breakfast.
Colleen: They are on a wharf and are going for breakfast....
Interviewer: So first the men went to The Bay to go shopping and
then what happened?
Colleen: They went shopping and saw a waterfall with fish. They
were catching some fish with little nets like in the stores to bring
home and when they were finished they met some horses on the
street.... I think that they are now going to a play or some
show because it says about a stage.Colleen continues to take the text and
try to make what she is reading fit
into her shopping mall schema.
However, she is having a harder time
making things fit, so she is adding
new elements that are less mall-like: a
waterfall with fish and a play on a
stage.It is possible that Colleen did not have a schema for understanding fishing on the open sea. Instead
of trying to puzzle through and trying to understand a difficult text, she instead rashly activated a
shopping mall schema, and then she attempted to construe the text as talking about a shopping trip. She
simply ignored those parts that she could not fit in to the shopping mall schema.
Schemas and memory. Now we are ready to summarize four important ways in which schemas
influence memory (Brewer & Nakamura, 1984):
Ɣ When people activate a schema, they often interpret information in a way that fits the schema.
Colleen interprets “headed down the bay” to mean that they went to the mall.
Ɣ People may ignore information that does not fit their schema. Colleen ignores many words and
statements referring to ships and water. However, sometimes information that does not fit a schema is
remembered well because it is so very surprising. If Colleen’s teacher usually wore ordinary clothes to
class but one day came to class wearing a ship captain’s outfit, that class would likely stand out in
Colleen’s mind, precisely because it was out of the ordinary.
Ɣ When people activate a schema, they may even distort information to fit the schema. The phrase “the
heavy sea and strong tide” does not readily fit with a shopping mall schema, but Colleen managed to
distort this information to fit her schema.