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Lecture Notes

Many people, when they hear this story, think that Amy is a little girl, that it's probably summer, and she went to get her piggy bank so she could get money to pay for a Popsicle from an ice cream truck. Well, if you had this, if you had this kind of concept or schema, or even a different one, how did you know the information about Amy? How did you fill in those blanks? Maybe it's from your own experiences when you were a child, but how would somebody think about that if they don't know what an ice cream truck is or if their neighborhood never had ice cream trucks in it? Might you can see this story a little bit differently, or fill in the information around Amy a little differently? So it's important to know that schemas are also culturally specific. If someone grew up in a rural America, would they have that same information about Amy? Or what if it was someone from a different country? So again, this is sort of showing the power of schemas and how they have an influence on how we understand and process the things around us.