Inhibitory effect of schematic processing on perceptual encoding.
William von Hippel, John Jonides, James L. Hilton, Sowmya Narayan · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 1993
It was hypothesized that although schemata facilitate organized conceptual processing, and hence recall, they simultaneously inhibit perceptual encoding. This inhibitory effect should emerge because schemata allow perceivers to rely on prior knowledge in place of incoming information and because schemata facilitate selective attention. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that Ss encode less relevant perceptual information when they are provided with or are able to induce a schema. Experiment 3 demonstrated that Ss encode less relevant perceptual information when they are self-schematic in a domain, even though they have better recall for that information. Experiment 4 demonstrated that Ss encode less irrelevant perceptual information when they are provided with a schema. Thus, results show that although schemata facilitate recall. they simultaneously inhibit perceptual encoding.