Schema Theory

10 Key excerpts on "Schema Theory"

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  Analogies at War

  Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965

  • Yuen Foong Khong(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Schema Theory, for example, holds that schemas are the building blocks of cognition. They are, according to David Rumelhart, the fundamental elements upon which all information pro-cessing depends/ 23 Specifically, they are necessary for interpreting sen-sory data, for retrieving information from memory, and for guiding the flow of processing in the system. 24 There does not yet exist a universally accepted or unified Schema Theory that accounts for all these aspects of information processing, and this lack has led some observers to argue that there is no such thing as Schema Theory. 25 In a strict sense, they are right; however, the schema concept has led to enough important and validated findings that, for the sake of convenience, it should be possible to refer to these findings as those of Schema Theory. More important, there is wide agreement about the centrality of the concept of the schema in modern-day studies of human information processing. In the words of Nisbett and Ross, It has become increasingly clear to theorists working in almost all areas of psychology that the schema construct is a corner-stone of psychological theory. 26 The advantage of adding a cognitive psychological dimension to my framework is manifest: the findings of cognitive psychology provide in-dependent corroboration for the assumption that analogies play an im-portant role in information processing. In my earlier discussion of the relative merits of the two contrasting views of policymakers' use of anal-ogies, I claim that the skeptics' view, with its emphasis on justification and advocacy, begs the question of how policymakers arrive at their de-cisions. The analytical view, in contrast, assumes that analogies help shape policymakers' interpretation of events and in so doing, make cer-tain options more attractive than others. 27 23 David Rumelhart, Schemata: The Building Blocks of Cognition, in Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension, ed.

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  Distributed Cognition and Reality

  How Pilots and Crews Make Decisions

  • Katherine L. Plant, Neville A. Stanton(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  The pioneering work of Bartlett and the schema theorists that followed remains in the modern use of Schema Theory; however, the problems and environments to which the theory is applied have become increasingly sophisticated and complex. This includes military processes such as command and control (Stanton et al., 2006; Salmon et al., 2009), fratricide (Rafferty et al., 2010) and large sociotechnical systems (Stewart et al., 2008; Jenkins et al., 2011). The fact that Schema Theory is utilised in current research suggests a consensus in the literature that a usable definition of schema is evident. The criticisms concerning the number and nature of definitions of schema do not appear to have hindered the application of Schema Theory in current practice.

  2.3.2  TESTABLE THEORY

  Critics have argued that Schema Theory does not fulfil the requirements of a theory. However, it is argued here that Schema Theory does fit the general requirements of a theory as defined by Kerlinger and Lee (2000), namely, that a tentative explanation of reality is offered that generates testable hypotheses which can be empirically validated or refuted to establish how accurately reality is represented. As defined by Kerlinger and Lee (2000), a theory must be capable of both predicting and explaining world phenomena. The definitions of schema have been clarified in the preceding section: Schema Theory describes how the schematic organising structures in the mind serve as mental templates to direct attention for information that is being perceived in the world and that this world information can have a modifying effect on the schemata due to the active, adaptable nature of schemata, which in turn will effect further perception (Neisser, 1976). Within this explanation, clear predictions can be made. For example, it can be hypothesised that an individual’s past experience, when mapped with information in the world, will result in their behaviour. One of the fundamental principles of Schema Theory is the recognition that experiential variations between people (e.g. culturally, professionally or socially) result in different schemata which will produce different actions and behaviours (Bartlett, 1932).

  Magazzu et al. (2006) found that drivers who held both motorcycle and car licences were less likely to be involved with car–motorcycle accidents, than car-only licence holders. Walker et al. (2011) discussed this in terms of Schema Theory. Schema Theory would predict that cognitive incompatibility between car drivers and motorcyclists is more prominent in car-only licence holders because the drivers do not have the appropriate schemata to deal with different road users (Walker et al., 2011). From this example, it is clear how Schema Theory is able to generate predictions and hypotheses (e.g. different road users will have different schemata which will result in different actions and behaviours) and provide an explanation of phenomena (e.g. accident rates between different road users).

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  The Constructive Mind

  Bartlett's Psychology in Reconstruction

  • Brady Wagoner(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Cognitive psychology then radically changed the con- cept by using the computer metaphor to articulate it. Schema was trans- formed into a static knowledge structure composed of different slots or nodes that either accept incoming information or fill in default values 136 Concept of Schema in Reconstruction where input is lacking. Schema is here severed from an organism’s functioning in the world. Although there have been attempts by discur- sive and ecological psychologists to bring back the earlier notion of schema in a new form, these developments have not affected the way in which the concept is generally understood in psychology. There are two major obstacles in bringing the Bartlettian concept of schema back into psychology: one meta-theoretical and one methodolo- gical. Meta-theoretically, the storage metaphor is both the common- sense and scientific taken-for-granted way of conceptualizing memory. As was seen with cognitive theories, theorists easily slip back into the language and assumptions of the storage metaphor. What is needed are powerful new metaphors to guide theory and research. One example is schema as ‘stage setting,’ advanced by Bransford, McCarrell, Franks, and Nitsch (1977) as an explicit development of Bartlett and Gibson’s ideas. According to them, “a major role of past experience is to provide ‘boundary constraints’ that set the stage for articulating the uniqueness as well as sameness of information” (p. 434, emphasis in original). This is very different from the notion that past experience is stored as traces and compared to present inputs. Instead, it highlights organismic attu- nement to the environment based on past experience, operating as a background condition rather than as isolated and fixed traces or a static framework composed of isolated nodes that receive information. For example, if one is used to driving a pickup truck this will set the stage for articulating the smoothness of a car’s ride.

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  Treating Depression

  MCT, CBT, and Third Wave Therapies

  • Adrian Wells, Peter Fisher, Adrian Wells, Peter Fisher(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Schema became the central con-cept in his cognitive explanation of vulnerability to depression and the lynchpin of the faulty information-processing system that characterizes depression. The symptoms of depression follow from a faulty information-processing system, which exhibits a negative self-referential bias because of the domination of dysfunctional schemas (i.e., attitudes and beliefs) about the self, the world, and the future (Beck, 1967, 1987, 2008). The schema concept is such a key pillar in Beck’s cognitive formulation that evidence invalidating this concept would throw the entire theoretical account into question. Beck (1967) stated that the schema concept was selected for the men-tal representation of emotional experience because of its familiarity and its ability to represent single, discrete ideas (e.g., what a shoe is) as well as more complex, global knowledge such as self-concept. He adopted the following definition of schema: A complex pattern, inferred as having been imprinted in the organismic structure by experience, that combines with the properties of the presented stimulus object or of the presented idea to determine how the object or idea is to be perceived and conceptualized. (Beck, 1967, p. 282) As enduring cognitive structures, schemas not only screen, orga-nize, and evaluate input from the internal and external world to the Schema Theory in Depression 121 information-processing system but can engage in a self-reflective, self-generative process – such as when a depressed person engages in rumi-nation (Papageorgiou & Wells, 2004) or in private self-evaluation (Beck, 1967). Schemas are the meaning-making structures of the cognitive orga-nization and are responsible for the cognitions that occupy the stream of consciousness (Beck, 1964). Human cognition is the product of both top-down, schema-driven processes and bottom-up processes that involve stimulus input and raw sensory experience.

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  Psychological Theories for Environmental Issues

  • Mirilia Bonnes, Terence Lee(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Schema Theory and the Role of Socio-Spatial Schemata in Environmental Psychology TERENCE LEE

  Historical and Theoretical Framework

  The concept of schema helps to explain how people construct representations in memory, how they process, interpret and understand streams of information. The argument presented in this chapter is that the schema is particularly helpful when applied to environmental evaluation, learning, navigation and behaviour.

  The memory theory of schema originated with Kant (1896), but so far as psychology is concerned, with Sir Henry Head, a neurologist. He was impressed by the observation that people retain a mental representation of an amputated limb for many years after its loss – the ‘phantom limb’ (Head, 1920). Earlier, Head and Holmes (1911) had studied the ‘postural schema’ – perceptions of the spatial aspects of the body that are continually revised by the integration of incoming sensations. The idea was extensively developed by Bartlett in his classic work on Remembering (1932).

  Bartlett’s work contributed to the reaction against associationism, with its ‘fixed, lifeless traces’ and helped to launch the cognitive revolution. Although the Gestaltists, particularly Koffka (1935), had argued for interaction between traces, it was Bartlett who delivered the coup de grace to memory as reproduction; replacing it by reconstruction. However, the domination of US ‘experimental’ psychology, which was mainly individualistic and molecular, meant that relatively little progress was made in Schema Theory until the emergence of social cognition in the sixties/seventies. There is now a burgeoning of research activity, most of it elaborating but only rarely disconfirming Bartlett’s original ideas.

  Edwards and Middleton (1987) remind us that there have also been some significant losses in the course of adopting and adapting Bartlett. The wheel is continually being reinvented in psychology. ‘Levelling’ and ‘sharpening’ of memory traces (so expressive!) have become ‘schema consistent /inconsistent’. Bartlett did not see schemata as static knowledge structures, but as ‘fluid models in the head’ which are ‘… social, affective and purposive, the basis of actions and reactions in the course of living one’s life’ (p. 80).

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  Expect the Unexpected

  Aspects of Pragmatic Foregrounding in Old Testament Narratives

  • Stefano Cotrozzi(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 S CHEMA T HEORY This chapter will present a short history of Schema Theory, concentrating on the version proposed by Schank and Abelson (1977), which will provide the basis for much of the investigation detailed in the following chapter. There will also be a brief review of more recent developments, and a discussion of some evidence pointing to the psychological reality of schemata. Finally, attention will be given to the relation between schemata and defamiliarization. 3.1. A Short History of the Concept of “Schema” The rst scholar to speak of schemata in a technical sense seems to have been the German philosopher I. Kant in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787). His schema is a construct of pure reason, an innate struc-ture which helps us perceive the world around us. Modern Schema Theory, however, begins with the work on remembering by Bartlett (1932). Bartlett presented his British informants with different types of texts and pictures in order to investigate memory performance at different retention intervals. In particular, he asked his subjects to read and reproduce the translation of a short North American folk tale, The War of the Ghosts —a story developed in a cultural and social environment “exceedingly different” (Bartlett 1932, 64) from that of his informants. Because of these differences and because the text “had no very manifest interconnexion” (Bartlett 1932, 64), the tale was in places quite difcult for Western minds to understand. Bartlett found that, particularly at longer retention intervals, his subjects tended unwittingly to omit, change or rationalize details that did not t their expectations, adapting them to more familiar settings and attitudes. 1 Bartlett also noted that coherence 1. For instance, “boats” replaced the original “canoes,” “paddling” became “row-ing,” “hunting seals” changed to “shing”; the ghosts in the story were sometimes interpreted as merely a tribal name or as visions seen by a wounded man. The Indian

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  Political Communication and Cognition

  • D. Lilleker(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Values tend to be macro-level constructs. Values are meta-narratives about how the world should be. Beliefs and attitudes tend to flow from values but tend to be an interpretation of our values relating to a specific product, issue, brand, organisation or individual (to be referred to collectively from now on as an item or items). Beliefs and attitudes are formed from the collected knowledge that we possess about an item. We store and retain information and then, when communication acts as a stimulus, we recall that information in order to assess any new information against the knowledge we already possess. Our brains have been doing for years what software such as Google analytics is still struggling to achieve: the ordering and re-ordering of information in ways that aid us to construct an idea of everything that we know about a subject and quickly access stored knowledge relevant to us at any particular moment. At this point it is useful to use the metaphor of the brain as a filing cabinet. Within our memory we store items relating to a particular item, this is known as our schema: the way in which we ‘classify, organise and interpret life experiences ... to make sense of them’ (Goffman, 1974: 56). We have a schema for every item we have knowledge about; schemas are useful ways to understand how we store information and access our memory.

  The schema we have for any item is based on all the elements we have mentally attached to that item. The basic example is the schema for a table, one that is offered within many textbooks of psychology. Within probably every society there is recognition of what a table is; this may be basic where the only experience of a table is of a flat piece of wood, glass or similar material, and four legs, one at each corner. However, our schema for tables may contain an array of different types, from the basic to the very ornate. However, if we are given the opportunity to expand on this, perhaps describe a favourite table, the image we supply would be highly complex. It may be a composite of tables, an ideal table perhaps. Or we may describe a table that is associated with certain connections with good times, or indeed bad times. I always recall a round ebony table my grandparents had when I was very young. Under it, hidden by a white table cloth, were the toys they kept for when I stayed. Early memories of playing under that table make that a very memorable piece of furniture. This highlights one of the important aspects of Schema Theory. Simply focusing on the basic elements of an item is insufficient to understand all the mental associations that are brought to mind by the mention of an object. Our brain responds in different ways to different tasks based upon their complexity. If asked to make simple, logical associations, such as describing the generic features of a table, very few of the neural impulses within our brains fire; basically our brains are not stimulated. However, when asked about emotional associations with items then a whole range of neural impulses fire. Our brain is making lots of connections between memories, exploring all the accumulated knowledge around the item. Suddenly the schema for a table includes happy memories of childhood play and learning, as well as safety, warmth and the deep affection for grandparents long since passed away.

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  The Nature of Rules, Regularities and Units in Language

  A Network Model of the Language System and of Language Use

  • Rolf Kreyer(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  5 Cognitive schemas Whereas the previous chapter focused on traditional descriptive concepts, cate-gories and rules, the present chapter discusses a number of concepts that could be subsumed under the umbrella term ‘cognitive schema’. This chapter begins with a description of schemas 83 from a psychological perspective and then dis-cusses how this notion has found its way into linguistics, in particular in the area of construction grammar and pattern grammar. In addition, we will also look at what I would like to call ‘recurrent item strings’. This term subsumes basic corpus linguistic notions such as ‘collocation’, ‘colligation’, POS-gram, etc. All of these also qualify as cognitive schemas, since they are based on lan-guage use and do away with the traditional separation of lexis and grammar. The chapter concludes with a description of how the network model advocated here accounts for such schemas. 5.1 Schemas in psychology and linguistics Language schemas as described in cognitive linguistics can be related back to fairly old and time-tested concepts in cognitive psychology 84 , where the idea that human memory is organised in terms of “interacting knowledge structures” (Rumelhart & Ortony 1977: 100) has been discussed and elaborated under vari-ous terms and guises. The most ‘traditional’ of these, ‘schema’, was introduced into modern psychology as early as 1932 in the writings of Bartlett (cf. Ru-melhart & Ortony 1977: 100), and has been used ever since by researchers in the field. Other, sometimes narrower but essentially similar, terms from the field of Artificial Intelligence are ‘frame’ (Minsky 1975) and ‘script’ (Schank 1975 and Schank & Abelson 1977), and even the more linguistic notion of ‘superstructure’ (van Dijk 1977 and 1980) can be regarded as a schema in the above sense. || 83 Both ‘schemas’ and ‘schemata’ are used as plurals for ‘schema’. The first alternative seems to be more frequently used, which is why I will use ‘schemas’ in the following.

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  Contemporary Stylistics

  Language, Cognition, Interpretation

  • Alison Gibbons, Sara Whiteley(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  Consider the schematic knowledge involved in your understanding of the text. Can Schema Theory offer an account of your response to the text? Further reading and references Lakoff (1987) outlines the forms of idealised cognitive models (ICMs) including Barsalou’s (1983) argument for ICMs being constructed online for ‘ad hoc’ categories. For recent cognitive psychological work on the context-dependency of knowledge structures, see Barsalou (2003). Work in Schema Theory began with Bartlett (1995 [1932]) and was developed by Artificial Intelligence researchers in the 1970s (e.g. see Minsky (1975) on ‘frames’; Schank and Abelson (1977) on ‘scripts’). Work on prototypes began with Rosch (1975, 1977, 1978) and see Lakoff (1987: 5–153) for an overview. Cook (1994) discusses literariness using the notion of schema refreshment (see Semino (1997) and Jeffries (2001) for critique and expansion of these ideas). Stockwell (2002a: 27–40, 75–90) provides a pioneering overview of the application of schema 188 TEXT AS COGNITION theory to literature, drawing on Cook (1994) and connecting schema disruption with Beaugrande’s (1980) work on informativity. Emmott et al. (2015) provide another useful overview of Schema Theory in stylistics, including more examples of its applications. See Walsh (2007) for an analysis of crossover fiction using Schema Theory. Prototype theory and Schema Theory are adopted to explore genre by: Gavins (2013), Gibbons (2016b), and Steen (2003, 2011). Ryan (1991) discusses the ‘principle of minimal departure’. For more on incongruity in humour, see Raskin (1985) and Simpson (1998, 2000, 2003). For more on Schema Theory and intertextuality, see Mason (forthcoming).

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  From Perception to Meaning

  Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics

  • Beate Hampe(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  It may even be possible at some later date to tie individual image schemas to elements of human cognitive and neural ÿpro-grammingþ relating to perception of the physical world ü a possibility sug-gested in Turner (1991: 182) and elsewhere. We have built-in detectors of 7. See Mark Johnsonýs ( this volume ) discussion of ÿinformal phenomenological analysis.þ Image schemas and perception 45 up and down, based on gravity, for example, and of relative brightness, and relative heaviness. 8 Defining image schemas in this way allows us to refer to a set of mental representations with a special and fundamental status, distinct from the infi-nite va riety of ÿschematicþ images which we can form over the course of a lifetime, including schemas of cups and other objects. In fact, if we take this definition seriously, we may need to exclude some of the spatial meanings encoded by prepositions and other such markers, even though it has been common in the literature to offer such meanings automatic membership in the image schema club. Talmy (2003: 216) mentions an Atsugewi spatial particle (the verb satellite -ikþs ) which denotes ÿmotion horizontally into solid matter, as chopping an ax into a tree trunk.þ Since this meaning elabo-rates other, more basic schemas such as PENETRATION , it does not seem to be a candidate for the set of basic meanings. Whatever our choice of terminology, it is useful to make such distinctions between the more basic and more complex (or derived) varieties of schematic image. 5.2. Sensory experience According to the proposed definition, image schemas are related to recurring patterns of particular bodily experience, including perceptions via sight, hearing, touch, kinesthetic perception, smell and possibly also internal sensa-tions such as hunger, pain, etc.

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