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

Bartlett’s approach highlights learners’ attitudes toward integrating novel information using their pre-experimental knowledge. Prior knowledge tied to one’s socio-cultural experiences, known as cultural schema, plays a facilitating role in immediate memory performance. However, few studies extend this effect to delayed retention and long-term forgetting using coherent narratives. In the current study, we investigated the influence of cultural schema in prose retention and its effects on long-term forgetting. The awareness of the cultural properties implied in the prose was an index of activated cultural schemas. Recall performance was assessed across multiple time intervals. Consistently, cultural schemas enhanced the remembering of an integrated narrative for both schema related and unrelated information. 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, forgetting rates are independent of the degrees of acquisition predicted by varying activation of cultural schemas.