(from Greek, schema: form; schemata is the plural although schemas is also used by those without the benefit of a classical education) A schema is a form of MENTAL SET—indeed, the term mental set is probably more frequently encountered in biological psychology than the term schema. The idea of a schema was introduced by Frederick Bartlett (1886–1969), the first Professor of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University. Bartlett worked on MEMORY and demonstrated how people’s recollections of events were shaped by their previous experiences—that is, by the various schemata (or mental sets) they had established for dealing with information. Schema allow us to generalize our experiences: if we visit a football stadium, for example, we establish a schema that will include information on how to behave and what we are likely to experience.
That schema can then be applied to later visits to other football grounds. A high-level schema is one that includes low-level schemata: a ‘going to a football ground’ schema for example might include lower-level ones such as ‘using public transport’ and ‘buying a programme’. A schema-driven error is a misrecollection of an event in which the schema substitutes its expectations for what actually occurred. Bartlett also used the term schema-plus-correction for events in which the schema account for the large majority situations but not quite all. The term schema-plus-tag has also been used to describe similar processes, the tag serving to highlight unusual features of particular cases that do not quite match the schema.
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