There has been much evidence to support the theory that the usage of schematic categorization has been correlated to greater memory recall and has been linked to the levels of processing theory.
The study being replicated is Mandler and Pearlstone (1966). This study was chosen as investigates schematic processing, and the role it plays on subsequent recall. A schema is the mental representation of an object, person, events or actions developed from our past knowledge of the world; it allows us to make broad generalizations on how things work around us. This is important as schemas affect our cognitive processes, and heavily integrated into our daily lives as they’re used to organise information, assist with memory recall, predict likely occurrences, and allow us to make sense of new information. Schemas are mental processes within the brain that influence how an individual thinks based upon assumptions and expectations of the individual. Mandler and Pearlstone (1966) investigated 2 groups of participants, a free group were told to use their own schemas to associate a word list of 52 words together, and a controlled group were told to use already categorized word lists, this was conducted 4 times with different word lists. The results indicated that the free group had fewer errors and required less time per trial compared to the controlled group, …show more content…
Essentially, the elaboration rehearsal of encoding information leads to better recall, while maintenance rehearsal of repetition only allows for short term retention of information. The Levels of Processing model is split into three parts, Structural and Phonemic being shallow levels of processing only involving the short term memory, and Semantic Processing which leads to long term