Command term "DISCUSS" - give a considered and balanced review, including a range of arguments, factors or hypotheses. Opinions and conclusions presented clearly supported by evidence.

INTRODUCTION

Sociocultural factors: the way we think is affected by our social and cultural upbringings

Cultures may be defined using the following cultural dimensions (Hofstede 1971):

Individualism: the encouragement of emotional expression, emphasis on individuality and distinction, based on achievements

Collectivism: discourages the expression of emotions as they are seen as irrelevant or unimportant, emphasis placed on social bonds

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HOW CULTURE AFFECTS MEMORY

Culture is both a system and a process, it affects what a person remembers and why they remember it based on how important it is within their culture and what areas are emphasised

Cross-cultural research into memory is often ethnocentric

Bartlett (1932) - War of the Ghosts study: demonstrated that recall can be affected by culture and social demands

Cognitive processes like memory are universal, but how they are used is not

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STUDY: Cole and Scribner (1974)

AIM: to investigate free recall in the USA and of the Kpelle people in Liberia

PROCEDURE - Schooled and unschooled Liberian children and schooled American children were used as participants - Had to recall a selection of words grouped into 4 lists - Words were culture-specific - Recall repeated several times - Part 2: Words were meaningful objects in a story

FINDINGS - The schooled Liberian students had similar results to the schooled American children - Liberian children remembered the objects in the story well, as they grouped them according to the role they played in the story - Schooled participants used chunking to group together informatoin

CONCLUSION - Western schooling emphasises chunking / clustering, something unfamiliar in the Kpelle culture - However, Kpelle children performed well in the culturally-familiar task (story) - Free recall has no significance in the Liberian tribe - Cognitive skills are present across cultures, but they depend upon the environment the person lives in

EVALUATION - Ethnocentrism - focused on American ways of thinking - Hard to establish a cause and effect relationship because schooling is subjective - It is not entirely clear how culture influences categorisation - Education is also influenced by social interactions at home - Age bias - children - hard to generalise to everyone

Another way in which culture influences information processing and memory is described in Bartlett's Schema Theory

STUDY: Bartlett (1932) - War of the Ghosts

AIM: To prove that memory is reconstructive, and to investigate whether cultural schemas influence the participants’ ability to recall stories

PROCEDURE - Participants were White-Americans - Bartlett asked them to read a Native American folk story (The War of the Ghosts) twice - Asked to recall / reproduce using two methods (conditions): - First method - serial reproduction: one person reproduces original story, then second person reproduces first reproduction etc. (goes on for 6 / 7 reproductions) - Second method: participants asked to read the story twice, then after 15 minutes were asked to reproduce the story from memory

FINDINGS - Story appeared to get shorter after 6 / 7 reproductions - Tended to leave out or replace details that were specific to Native American culture (e.g. canoe was replaced with boat) - Tended to fill in the gaps in their memory with their own cultural schemas

CONCLUSION - People reconstruct the past by trying to remember things in terms of their own existing schemas - People try to associate unknown / vague / foreign concepts to their own understanding / experiences, people use their own schemas to fill in gaps - The more complicated the story, the more distortions there were

EVALUATION - Low ecological validity - not a natural experiment - Very few standardised rules, messy / unstructured - No control group - Cultural bias - European Americans - Emic approach - difficult to generalise