The Constructive Nature of Memory • 219participants in the control group, who had read that John was looking for the nail.
Apparently, the participants in the experimental group inferred, from the use of the
word pounding, that a hammer had been used, even though it was never mentioned.
This makes sense because we usually pound nails with hammers, but in this case the par-
ticipant’s inference has caused an error of memory (also see McDermott & Chan, 2006).
Here is the scenario used in another memory experiment, which was designed
specifi cally to elicit inferences based on the participants’ past experiences (Arkes &
Freedman, 1984):In a baseball game, the score is tied 1 to 1. The home team has runners on fi rst and third,
with one out. A ground ball is hit to the shortstop. The shortstop throws to second base,
attempting a double play. The runner who was on third scores, so it is now 2–1 in favor
of the home team.After hearing a story similar to this one, participants were asked to indicate whether
the sentence “The batter was safe at fi rst” was part of the passage. From looking at the
story, you can see that this sentence was never presented, and most of the participants who
didn’t know much about baseball answered correctly. However, participants who knew
the rules of baseball were more likely to say that the sentence had been presented. They
based this judgment on their knowledge that if the runner on third had scored, then the
double play must have failed, which means that the batter safely reached fi rst. Knowledge,
in this example, resulted in a correct inference about what probably happened in the ball
game, but an incorrect inference about the sentence that was presented in the passage.Scripts and Schemas The examples above illustrate how people’s memory reports can
be infl uenced by their knowledge. A schema is a person’s knowledge about some aspect
of the environment. For example, a person’s schema of a post offi ce might include what
a post offi ce building usually looks like from the
outside, what is inside the post offi ce, and the ser-
vices it provides. We develop schemas through our
experiences in different situations, such as visiting
a post offi ce, going to a ball game, or listening to
lectures in a classroom.
In an experiment that studied how memory is
infl uenced by people’s schemas about offi ces, par-
ticipants were seated in an offi ce waiting to be in an
experiment (● Figure 8.14). When the participants
were called into another room, they were told that
the experiment was actually a memory experiment,
and their task was to write down what they had
seen while they were sitting in the offi ce (Brewer
& Treyens, 1981). The participants responded by
writing down many of the things they remembered
seeing, but they also included some things that were
not there but that fi t into their “offi ce schema.”
For example, although there were no books in the
offi ce, 30 percent of the participants reported hav-
ing seen books. Thus, the information in schemas
can provide a guide for making inferences about
what we remember. In this particular example, the
inference turned out to be wrong. Other examples
of how schemas have led to erroneous decisions in
memory experiments have made use of a type of
schema called a script.
A script is our conception of the sequence of
actions that usually occur during a particular expe-
rience. For example, your script for visiting a post
offi ce might include waiting in line, fi lling out forms●FIGURE 8.14 Offi ce in which Brewer and Treyens’ (1981) participants
waited before being tested on their memory for what was present in the
offi ce. (Source: Reprinted from W. F. Brewer & J. C. Treyens, “Role of Schemata in Memory for
Places,” Cognitive Psychology, 13, 207–230. Copyright 1981, with permission from Elsevier.)
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