Discuss how social or cultural factors affect one cognitive process
We will link together memory (cognitive process) to culture.
Culture is both a system (values, schemas, models, artifacts) and a process (rituals, daily
routines, and practices). Culture affects why people remember, how they remember, when they remember, what they remember and whether they find it necessary to remember at all.
When researchers conduct cross-cultural memory research with participants from Western and non-Western cultures they often use tasks developed in psychology laboratories, such as free recall of lists of unrelated words. In such tasks, the people from Western cultures generally do better. This could be because such tasks are meaningless to non-Western people.
Study to use: Rogoff and Waddel (1982) you could always Bartlett as another example.
Culture and memory …to sum up:
· The implication of many cross-cultural memory studies is that, although the ability to remember is universal (hardware), specific forms of remembering (software) are not universal but rather context-bound.
· A methodological problem exists as most memory research is conducted in cultures with formal schooling systems. This makes it difficult to generalize findings to cultures with no formal schooling.