Cultural life scripts as schema: recalling schema congruent and incongruent events from a hypothetical life story

This study, involving 34 Malaysian adults, investigated if the memory of cultural life script congruent and incongruent events was better than life script neutral events. We created a 1500-word hypothetical life story of a Malaysian girl comprising six life script congruent, six life script incongruent, and six life script neutral events. Half of those events were high-frequent, and half were low-frequent life script events. Participants first read the story on a computer screen and then completed a free recall test ten minutes later and again one week later. They recalled as many details as they could from the 18 events presented in the story. The results revealed that participants retrieved more information from the life script incongruent events than from life script congruent events at both recall points. The memory for high-frequent life script events was better than for low-frequent and life script-neutral events. Overall, the recall rate was higher in the immediate than in the late phase. The results confirm the isolation effects or Von Restorff effect, which predicts that unusual and distinctive events are more memorable than typical, commonly expected events.