Schema Theory

What do you
think when you
look at this
picture?
What is a schema?
• A schema is a mental representation that organizes our
knowledge, beliefs and expectations in relation to a specific
aspect of life (e.g., an object, place, event, person, activity).
• A schema is built up from prior experience.
• Schemas are quite stable, deeply rooted and organized.
• As active processors of information, humans integrate new
information with existing, stored information. Any new
information that we acquire is actively perceived through the
lens of existing schemas.
What is a schema?
• We are ‘cognitive misers’: schemas save us some effort in
thinking.
• Schemas influence the encoding and retrieval of
memories.
• Schemas are like a lens through which we perceive reality.
As a lens can distort light, so a schema can give rise to
biases and memory distortions.
Jean Piaget and
schemas
• The concept of schema was first used by Jean Piaget in 1926. 
• He suggested that children learn using existing schemas that are either
accommodated or assimilated. 
• Assimilation is when you add information to your schema.
• Accommodation is when an existing schema is replaced. 

(You can read about Jean Piaget and these ideas on p. 431 of the textbook.)
The War of the Ghosts
(Bartlett, 1932)
Bartlett (1932) described how schemas
influence memory in his classic study
based on a Native American folktale.
This was an unusual story for people from
a Western culture to understand because
it contained unfamiliar supernatural
concepts and an odd, causal structure.
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy
and calm. Then they heard war cries and they thought; "Maybe this is a war-party." They escaped to the shore and
hid behind a log.
Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men
in the canoe, and they said; "What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war
on the people."
One of the young men said: "I have no arrows."
"Arrows are in the canoe," they said.
"I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you," he said, turning to the
other, "may go with them."
So, one of the young men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the
other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and began to fight, and many were killed. But presently,
one of the young men heard one of the warriors say: "Quick, let us go home. That Indian has been hit."
Now he thought: "Oh, they are ghosts." He did not feel sick, but he had been shot. 
So, the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young man went back to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody
and said: "Behold, I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed and many of
those that attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, but I did not feel sick."
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose, he fell down. 
Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead.
Bartlett, 1932
• Participants were allocated into one of two
conditions:  
• one group was asked to use repeated reproduction,
where participants heard the story and were told to
reproduce it after a short time and then to do so again
repeatedly over a period of days, weeks, months or
years. 
• The second group was told to use serial
reproduction, in which they had to recall the story
and repeat it to another person (telephone).
Bartlett’s results
Bartlett found that their accounts were distorted in several ways that, generally, made
them more consistent with a Western worldview. 
Specifically, he found the following;
• Rationalization errors—making the story read more like a typical English story, e.g.,
"canoe" was changed to "boat" and "hunting seals" was changed to "going fishing".
Most of the errors were of this nature.
• Omissions (Leveling) — Leaving out information that was not essential to the
understanding of the story. 
• Changes of order – events were sometimes re-ordered to make the story more coherent
• Sharpening – adding details to “fill in the gaps” of the story.
Evaluation of Bartlett
• Bartlett’s study wasn't a very well-
controlled study. 
• Bartlett did not give very specific
instructions to his participants. 
• There was no standardized time after
which participants had to recall the
story. 
• He also did not tell his participants to be
as accurate as possible.
 Evaluation of Bartlett
IV = Method of recall

• There was no difference in the performance of

the two groups -  in other words, the IV did not
affect the DV.
 Evaluation of Bartlett
IV = Culture
• There was no control group to see if other
cultures would remember the story differently. 
For example, there was no native American group
asked to recall the story.
• Cause and effect cannot be established
because no independent variable was
manipulated.
Types of schema
Many types of schemas have been identified. Some
examples are:
• Social schemas – mental representations about
various groups of people, for example a
stereotype.
• Scripts – schemas about sequences of events, for
example, going to a restaurant.
• Self-schemas – mental representations about
ourselves.
Darley and Gross (1983) (see p.146)
Social schemas
• One group of participants was told that the girl they would see in
the video came from a high socio-economic background, and the
other that she was from a low socio-economic background.
• Both groups watched a video of her take a test.
• Then they were asked to judge her academic performance.
• Those that thought she came from a high socio-economic
background thought gave considerably higher ratings of academic
performance.
• It was concluded that pre-stored schemas (about what it means to
be rich or poor) were used to interpret the ambiguous information
and influenced participants perceptions accordingly.
 Black, Bower and Turner (1979)

Scripts
• Participants were given two stories to read: one about a visit to
the doctor and the other about a visit to the dentist. They were
similar in terms of the opening and concluding statements but
otherwise were different in content.
• Participants were given a 20-minute filler task.
• When asked to recall the stories they tended to mix up
information, for instance, recalling “checking in with the
receptionist” for the dentist story when this had only been
mentioned in the doctor story.
• This is because both stories relate to the same underlying
script. This means that when our memory fails us, we will fill in
gaps with information from the script.
Aaron Beck’s theory of
depression
Self-schemas

• Beck suggests that the

negative self-schema that
people develop about
themselves may be a driving
force behind depression.
Features of schemas

Leveling: leaving out information that was not essential to the understanding of

the story. 

Sharpening: adding details to “fill in the gaps” of the story.

Confabulation: a memory error in which gaps in a person's memory are

unconsciously filled with fabricated, misinterpreted, or distorted information.

Schema congruence:  information that is in line with our past experience and

knowledge.  
 Schema theory
TOP-DOWN
PROCESSING

BOTTOM-UP
PROCESSING

Top-down processing occurs when your prior knowledge or expectations (schemas)

act as a lens or filter for the information that you receive and process.
 • Can lead to biases.
• But is very necessary – we could not survive
without it.
• If we did not have some simplified expectations
about the world, sequences of events, ourselves
Schematic and other people, we would find it extremely
(top-down) difficult to make day-to-day decisions.
• It saves energy.
processing • We are “pattern-seeking animals”.
• The process of seeing patterns in otherwise
unstructured stimuli is called pattern
recognition.