schema

schema, in social science, mental structures that an individual uses to organize knowledge and guide cognitive processes and behaviour. People use schemata (the plural of schema) to categorize objects and events based on common elements and characteristics and thus interpret and predict the world. New information is processed according to how it fits into these mental structures, or rules. In social science, particularly in cognitive science, it is understood that humans retrieve knowledge from various areas to draw conclusions about missing or non-evidential information, such as during decision making or political evaluation. Schemata represent the ways in which the characteristics of certain events or objects are recalled, as determined by one’s self-knowledge and cultural-political background. Examples of schemata include rubrics, perceived social roles, stereotypes, and worldviews.

The concept of schema was first introduced into psychology by British psychologist Frederic Bartlett in Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932). Bartlett perceived organized knowledge as an elaborate network of abstract mental structures that represent a person’s understanding of the world, and he studied the impact of one’s cultural background in rephrasing and memorizing certain events. For example, in one of his best-known studies, he examined whether subjects could recall events that strongly deviate from their own environmental background, and he showed that the more culturally different one’s own background was from that of the presented story, the less likely it was that participants could remember the story. Bartlett concluded that the participants distorted the presented story in favour of their own cultural stereotypes, and details that were difficult to interpret were omitted because they did not fit in with the participants’ own schemata.

In general, the learner in schema theory actively builds schemata and revises them in light of repeated exposure to new information. Here it is important to mention that each schema is unique and depends on an individual’s experiences and cognitive processes. American psychologist David Ausubel introduced his “meaningful learning theory” in Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View (1968). He argued that there is a hierarchical organization of knowledge and that new information can be incorporated into the already existing hierarchy. In contrast, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget argued that there is more than one body of knowledge available to learners. Piaget claimed that there exists a network of context-specific bodies of knowledge and that humans apply those bodies of knowledge according to specific situations.

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Schemata allow one to perceive the whole picture of an event or object based on partial information structures. This reference is possible because each schema has a main category, a so-called slot that connects different semantic networks. For example, the main slot “house” stores the information “wall,” “roof,” and “floor,” and, within the context of part–whole relationships, one can therefore infer that a house has a wall, a roof, and a floor. Moreover, each schema is developed in a way that helps to simplify drawing conclusions of a represented concept. For example, if one knows that an object is a door, then, according to the definition of a schema “door,” we can assume that it has a lock, a handle, and hinges.

In 1981, American researchers William Brewer and James Treyens studied the effects of schemata in human memory. In their study, 30 subjects were brought into the office of the principal investigator and were told to wait. After 35 seconds, the subjects were asked to leave the room and to list everything that they could recall being in there. Brewer and Treyens showed that the subjects could recall all those objects that fit into their schema of “office room,” and they had a much more faulty memory of those items that were not a part of their schema. For example, 29 of the 30 subjects recalled that the office had a chair, a desk, and walls, but only eight could recall the anatomic skull or a writing pad. Interestingly, nine subjects mentioned that they had seen books, but, in fact, there were no books in the office. Being able to recall books when books were not among those objects present shows that memory of the characteristics of certain locations depends on schemata associated with those types of locations.

Certain strategies of simplifying schemata include stereotypes and archetypes that drive the decision-making process. Prior knowledge plays a role in cognitive processing, as pre-existing schemata often need to be activated to relate to new information. This is described in the literature as “stimulating recall of prior knowledge.” Teachers, for example, activate student’s prior knowledge through reading the heading and the title before starting a new subject related to it. Another teaching strategy is using analogies and comparisons to activate the learner’s existing schema in particular to help learners draw connections among already existing schemata.