Study outline!!

Cole & Scribner

Aim:
Cole & Scribner used an emic approach to see how culture could affect memory. They
wanted to see the effect that schooling would have on the strategies that children used to
memorise lists of words.

Method:
- Participants: Rural Liberian children and US children
- Participants were given a free-recall task (able to recall objects in any order)
- They were shown a large number of objects, one at a time, and then asked to
remember them
- The list shows that the objects appear to fall into four distinct categories. To make
sure that the list was not too ethnocentric

Results:
- Children who were not attending school showed no regular increase in memory
performance after the age of 9 or 10. These participants remembered approximately
ten items on the first trial and managed to recall only two more items after 15 practice
trials. The Liberian children who were attending school, by contrast, learned the
materials rapidly, much the way schoolchildren of the same age did in the United
States.
- School-children in Liberia and the United States not only learned the list rapidly but
used the categorical similarities of items in the list to aid their recall. After the first
trial, they clustered their responses; for example, they would recall items of clothing,
then items of food, and so on. The non-schooled Liberian participants did very little
clustering, indicating that they were not using the categorical structure of the list to
help them remember.
- In a later trial, the researchers varied the recall task so that the objects were now
presented in a meaningful way as part of a story. The unschooled children recalled
the objects easily and actually chunked them according to the roles they played in
the story.

Conclusions:
Memory studies like these invite reflection. It seems that even though the ability to remember
is universal, strategies for remembering are not universal. Generally, schooling presents
children with a number of specialised information-processing tasks, such as organising large
amounts of information in memory and learning to use logic and abstract symbols in
problem-solving. It is questionable whether such ways of remembering have parallels in
traditional societies like the Kpelle children studied by Cole and Scribner. The conclusion is
that people learn to remember in ways that are relevant to their everyday lives, and these do
not always mirror the activities that cognitive psychologists use to investigate mental
processes.