Socio-cultural+Factors

Discuss how social or cultural factors affect one cognitive process.

= The role of socio-cultural factors on Memory  = How external influences, such as social encounters and cultural interactions affect our storage and recall of memory. How other people affect how and what we remember (or think we remember!)
 * Schooling **
 * Cole & Scribner
 * Investigating the role of schooling on memory strategies of differently-cultured children
 * Gave US-raised children and Liberian children of the Kpelle tribe quizzes to test recall ability
 * Results- Western-raised children used learned techniques such as chunking (grouping together words of certain categories) whereas unschooled (attention- not un-educated!) children tended to remember words in a random order- hence remembering fewer. The children's scholarly upbringing had a large effect on the reliability of their short-term memory, proving that memory can be improved with practise and technique.


 * Outside influences (media, ideas from peers, advertisments) **
 * Neisser & Harsch
 * Investigating the effect of time (and therefore outside factors) on memories of witnessed events
 * Interviewed witnesses once within 24 hours of the "Challenger" space craft crash, and then again two years later
 * Results- Outside influences and time itself resulted in significant changes from 40% of the participant' initial recounts to their post-two-years accounts. Exterior factors, such as news reports, other people's accounts of the story, personal trauma (the mind trying to protect itself against painful memories) came together to change almost half of the participants' memories of what happened. This was confirmed as they gave accurate accounts immediately post-event.


 * External Suggestions (ideas from peers, superiors, etc) **
 * Loftus
 * Investigating the role of suggestion in recall
 * After witnessing a robbery committed by people in a green van, participants are exposed to a new reporter claiming, subtly, that the van was white. When interviewed post-event many participants claimed honestly to have seen a white van
 * This mistake (not lie) is a result of the mere suggestion that the van had been white, and this proves that memory is extremely fallible and easily manipulated.


 * Loftus & Palmer
 * Investigating the role of leading questions in recall- the nature of a question can influence the answer/memory
 * Showing participants a car wreck and asking them about it, but varying the term "the cars collided" to "smashed", "contacted"...
 * Results: the more brutal the word, the higher the speed estimates. This is because the question is manipulated to yield a certain result. The more aggressive the question, the more aggressive the answer will be.