Overview
schema
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A plan, diagram, or outline, especially a mental representation of some aspect of experience, based on prior experience and memory, structured in such a way as to facilitate (and sometimes to distort) perception, cognition, the drawing of inferences, or the interpretation of new information in terms of existing knowledge. The term was first used in a psychological sense by the English neurologist Sir Henry Head (1861–1940), who restricted its meaning to a person's internal body image, and it was given its modern meaning by the English psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886–1969) in his book Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social psychology (1932, p. 199) to account for the observation that errors in the recall of stories tend to make them more conventional, which Bartlett attributed to the assimilation (5) of the stories to pre-existing schemata. The concept of a frame (2), introduced in 1975 by the US cognitive scientist Marvin (Lee) Minsky (born 1927), is essentially a schema formalized in artificial intelligence. A script (3) is a schema of an event sequence. See also causal schema, constructivism, perceptual schema, scheme, self-schema, War of the Ghosts. Compare mental model, prototype (2). schemata or schemas pl. [From Greek schema a form, from echein to have]
From: schema in A Dictionary of Psychology »
