Between the lines: Role of cultural schemas in remembering and forgetting

Bartlett's approach highlights learners' attitudes toward integrating novel information using their preexperimental knowledge. Prior knowledge tied to one's sociocultural experiences, known as cultural schemas, plays a facilitating role in immediate memory performance. However, few studies extend this effect to delayed retention and long-term forgetting using coherent narratives. The current study investigated the effects of cultural schemas on remembering and forgetting in prose memory. Across four experiments, participants were invited to read a narrative passage and then completed cued-recall tests at immediate and delayed retention intervals. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants' interpretation of the cultural properties implied in the narrative served as an index of activated cultural schemas. In Experiments 3 and 4, cultural schema activation was manipulated by presenting culturally familiar versus unfamiliar narratives. Consistently, we observed a facilitating effect of cultural schemas on the remembering of a coherent narrative, with activated schemas enhancing both immediate and delayed retention. The form of forgetting in prose memory followed a negatively accelerating pattern, which was more accurately described by a power function in both group and individual data. Notably, the rates of forgetting are independent of the initial degree of learning manipulated by the activation of cultural schemas.