Schema Theory

Cognitive schema

Mental representations based on prior experience and knowledge

Assimilation

Process of integrating new knowledge into existing schemas

Accomodation

Process of adjusting existing schema to better fit the environment

Jean Piaget’s schema

First person to introduce schema/ Believe children construct various schemas as they grow to help them understand certain aspects

Disequilibrium

Uncomfortable situation where we are not sure if what we are looking at really is a chair and whether we can sit there

Script

A type of schema/ behavior patterns learned through our interaction with the environment/ Study: bower et al, where participants were asked to recall a text about going to doctors, participants filled in the details that were a part of the script, not the text, this shows that the script that pre-existed in their mind filled in the missing details when they were remembering them

Mahon et al

Studied the brain participants in two groups, born blind and sighted participants (control group) presented with spoken words representing different objects categories/ researchers scan their brains when they are listening to the words to see which areas of the brain were activated/ patterns of blind participants were compared to ones with sighted ones to see if there are any similarities/ ventral stream showed similar activation patterns for conceptually similar categories/ suggets that the brain naturally organizes knowledge by category

Cohen

Argued that the concept of schema is too vague and hypothetical to be useful, argued that many studies suffer from low construct validity

Tse et al

Investigated whether having schema help animals learn and store new information faster/ phase 1: rats were placed in curricular arena with eight food wells, each with a unique flavor/ over the days rats learn these locations forming a schema/ then researchers added a new flavor and location, keeping the og the same/ because the new pair fits into the existing pattern, it could easily update its schema, rats learn it quickly / Second condition: researchers made many changes, introduced new pairs and replaced existing ones, didn’t match schema anymore/ learning was slower, memory formation took more trials/ supports the argument that schemas make learning more efficient, helping new information get stored more quickly

Van Kesteren et al

Showed 30 people the beginning of a movie, for half the group, scrambled the order of scenes so it wouldn’t make sense, the next day everyone watched the ending of the movie while their brains where scanned using fMRI/ people who had schema (saw the first part in correct order) used vmPFC more while people who didn’t have schema showed more communication between hippocampus and vmPFC/ suggest our brains work harder to build connections when we don’t already understand something