Schema (psychology)

A schema is an organized mental structure that represents knowledge about objects, people, events, or situations. It guides attention, interpretation, memory, and expectations.

Top-down processing: Perception and interpretation guided by prior knowledge, expectations, and context. Schemas supply prior knowledge that shapes how ambiguous or incomplete information is interpreted.
Concept: A mental representation of a category, object, event, or abstract idea. Concepts are units of knowledge that schemas organize into broader structures.
Immanuel Kant: An eighteenth-century German philosopher whose work examined how mental structures shape experience. Kant’s account of cognitive structures helped establish the idea that experience is actively organized.
Stereotype: A generalized belief about the characteristics of members of a social group. Stereotypes are social schemas that organize expectations about groups and their members.
Bottom-up processing: Perception driven primarily by incoming sensory information rather than prior expectations. It contrasts with the top-down influence schemas exert on perception.
Assimilation and accommodation: Processes by which people fit experiences into existing mental structures or change those structures. These processes describe how schemas absorb new experiences or change when experiences do not fit.
Script (cognitive science): A schema representing the typical sequence of events in a familiar situation. Scripts are a specific kind of schema for routine activities, such as dining in a restaurant.
Frederic Bartlett: A British psychologist known for experimental studies of memory as reconstructive. Bartlett demonstrated how prior knowledge and cultural expectations alter remembered stories.
Priming (psychology): A change in how quickly or readily information is processed after exposure to related information. Activating a schema can make its associated concepts more accessible.
Connectionism: An approach to cognition that models mental processes through networks of simple, interconnected units. Connectionist models explain learned knowledge without always representing explicit schema structures.

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