Schema

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When you are traveling, you’re always wondering what your accommodations will be like. In hotels, houses, and bed-breakfast settings, accommodations are about convenience and what you have to settle for. It is a compromise between cost and value.

In the eye, accommodation is the adjustment of the lens to varying distances. It is about compromising effort and clarity.

In learning, accommodation is an adjustment to the environment.  You’re getting along just fine, storing information in the categories you currently have. But then you get hit with new information that doesn’t fit in with what you already know. You must create a new category. Accommodation is a compromise between laziness and mental effort.

Here are 5 things we’ll cover:

• Schema
• Assimilation & Accommodation
• Kelly
• Piaget
• Vygotsky

 

Terms

• Man serenading a woman”
• “waiting room”
• abandonment schema
• abstract thinking
• abstraction
• accessibility
• accommodation
• activation
• adaptation
• alternative constructions
• amplification
• assimilation
• attitudes
• available schemas
• Bartlett, Frederic (1932)
• beliefs
• Bransford & Johnson (1972)
• Brewer & Treyens (1981)
• categories
• causal attribution
• chaos
• clinical method
• cognitive development
• cognitive distortion
• cognitive structures
• concrete operational stage
• conservation
• consistent information preference
• constructive alternativism
• constructive changes
• constructs
• context sensitive schemas
• context vs. no context
• developmental stages
• disequilibrium
• distinctive thinking style
• distorting effects
• egocentric
• emotion
• encoding stage
• equilibrium
• ethnic schemas
• expectations
• favorite schemas
• feature detection
• filters
• formal operational stage
• frame
• gap fillers
• heuristics
• hypotheses
• hypothetical situations
• incidental encoding
• incompatible
• integrated memory representation
• integration
• interpretation
• intuitive thinking
• irrelevant information
• Kant, Immanuel
• Kelly, George (1967)
• large alterations
• magical thinking
• mental models
• narrowly conceived
• number manipulation
• object classification
• object schemas
• old schemas
• ordinal relationships
• organization
• organized patterns
• patterns
• permeable
• peroperational stage
• person as scientist
• person schemas
• personal construct theory
• perspectives
• Piaget, Jean (1923)
• prejudices
• priming
• proactive interference = existing schema influence present inputs
• problem solving
• proximal zone of development
• range
• reality
• reconstructive changes
• reflexes
• Remembering (1932) by Frederic Bartlett
• response generation
• retrieval stage
• retroactive interference = new inputs influence existing schema
• role schema
• rubrics
• rules
• samples
• scaffolding
• scene
• Schank & Abelson = scripts
• schema
• schema hierarchy
• schemas
• schemata
• scripts
• selective
• self-schemas
• self-sustaining schemas
• sensorimotor stage
• single point of view
• slight alterations
• social roles
• specificity
• stereotypes
• stimulus features
• storyboard
• style of thinking
• systematic searches
• theory of mind
• thingamabobs
• traveling counselor
• triggers
• Vygotsky
• War of the Ghosts
• workflow
• worldview

Quiz

1. Which uses minor cognitive distortions to fit reality into current schemas:

• a. accommodation
• b. gap junctions
• c. assimilation
• d. filters

 

2. The “Man serenading a woman” experiment was done by:

• a. Bransford & Johnson (1972)
• b. Brewer & Treyens (1981)
• c. Bartlett, Frederic (1932)
• d. Kelly, George (1967)

3. Schema therapy might address your:

• a. abandonment schema
• b. abstract thinking
• c. accommodation
• d. accessibility

4. According to Piaget, which stage has abstract thinking:

• a. concrete operational
• b. formal operational
• c. preoperational
• d. sensorimotor

5. When a schema isn’t working for you, Kelly suggestion you select an:

• a. alternative construction
• b. attribution of causality
• c. expectation schema
• d. amplification

 

 

 

1. Which uses minor cognitive distortions to fit reality into current schemas:

• a. accommodation
• b. gap junctions
• c. assimilation
• d. filters

2. The “Man serenading a woman” experiment was done by:

• a. Bransford & Johnson (1972)
• b. Brewer & Treyens (1981)
• c. Bartlett, Frederic (1932)
• d. Kelly, George (1967)

3. Schema therapy might address your:

• a. abandonment schema
• b. abstract thinking
• c. accommodation
• d. accessibility

4. According to Piaget, which stage has abstract thinking:

• a. concrete operational
• b. formal operational
• c. preoperational
• d. sensorimotor

5. When a schema isn’t working for you, Kelly suggestion you select an:

• a. alternative construction
• b. attribution of causality
• c. expectation schema
• d. amplification

 

 

: creating mental models

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. What Are Schemas?

• cognitive structures
• categories
• mental models
• differ between people
• based on personal knowledge base
• As your knowledge base grows, your schemas expand

How Schemas Develop

• Start with a simple schema for animals
• all animals are referred to as dog or cat or duck
• friendly cats, touchy cats

How Do Schemas Work?

• use schema to organize knowledge
• use schema to interpret new info
• it is hard to change schemas
• hardest to change schemas based on only a few samples
• Grand Place in Brussels

Schema Characteristics

• develop over time; gradual build up
• product of our experience
• unique to us
• automatically triggered
• any sensory input can trigger a schema
• all the senses can be involved, individually or collectively
• context sensitive
• accessible & available

Why Use Schemas

• organize your thinking
• plan your behaviors
• allow you to anticipate events and fill in missing details
• automatic

When Are Schemas Used?

• activated by stimulus features
• the fewer the samples, the stronger the schema
• prejudices and stereotypes
• priming

Types of Schema: person, self and script

Person schema

• general knowledge and beliefs about other people
• traits, characteristics & behaviors
• helpful, friendly and honest?
• are generalizations about people

Self-schemas

• person schemas about you
• general knowledge about who you are
• about your own personality, abilities and goals

Scripts are event schemas

• knowledge of interpersonal behaviors
• what to do where
• restaurants
• someone says hello to you

More Examples

• cultural schema (sports, personal distance, gestures)
• role schema (police officer, judge, professor, student)
• world view
• stereotypes
• prejudice

Schema or Schemata?

You can use schemata for an individual schema and schema for the plural. You can use schema for singular and schemata for plural.  Or you can use schema for singular and schemas for plural. I use whichever the spellchecker won’t complain about. I have a pretty flexible schema for schemas.

Evidence for schema

Piaget (1923)

• first application of term to psychology
• how them form: assimilation, accommodation
• categories expand (living and non-living cats)
• dessert as an appetizer

Bartlett (1932)

• War of the Ghosts

Bransford & Johnson (1972)

• “Man serenading a woman”
• Conditions
• no context (3.6 ideas correct from 14)
• context before (8 ideas correct from 14)
• context after (3.6 ideas correct from 14)
• Conclusion: Right schema during encoding aids understanding & remembering

Brewer & Treyens (1981)

• Schemas during incidental encoding
• Participants put in this “waiting room”
• Spent less than 1 minute there
• Most recalled a chair and a desk
• 1/3 remembered books
• No books
• Given surprise memory test
• average recall = 13.5 objects
• items with high schema expectancy & saliency more likely to be recalled
• 19/88 objects were inferred (i.e. not actually in the room)

Distorting effects of schemas

• Constructive changes: occur during the encoding stage
• Reconstructive changes: occur during the retrieval stage
• Difficult to determine exactly when they occur – can even be at both stages

4 Impacts on memory

• Selection: keep most relevant information
• Abstraction: information stored in terms of its meaning
• Interpretation: use relevant information from LTM
• Integration: form & store a single integrated memory representation

2. Assimilation & Accommodation

Assimilation

• adding info to knowledge base
• like putting more things in your house
• small adjustments
• slight cognitive distortion
• thingamabobs = things in a box

Accommodation

• large adjustments
• buy an additional house
• add new categories
• differentiate between categories
• add categories for live cats, fictional cats, cartoon cats, book cats, neighbor cats, etc.
• department store schema
• shopping mall schema
• bus schema
• librarian schema

3. George Kelly (1905-1967)

Life

• born on April 28, 1905
• farm near Perth, Kansas
• only child
• no consistent schooling
• family moved to Colorado
• homesteaders
• by covered wagon
• too little water
• failed
• Great Depression
• Dust Bowl

Traveling counselor

• Used Freudian approach
  • lie down on a couch
  • free associate
  • tell dreams
  • looked for resistances or symbols of sexual and aggressive needs
  • people accepted his interpretations
  • clients improved slow & steady
• Questioned Freudian approach
  • not appropriate for Kansan farmers
  • seemed far-fetched at times
  • made up own interpretations
  • clients improved slow & steady
• Concluded
  • people want an explanation for their difficulties
  • a way of understanding them
  • turn the “chaos” of their lives into some order
  • any explanation from an authority would do
  • explanations from their own lives were even better

Philosophy: Constructive alternativism

• Only one true reality
  • reality is experienced from lots of perspectives
  • alternative constructions
  • each person has their own
• Some constructions are better than others
  • normal vs seriously mentally ill
  • physician’s vs patient
• No one’s construction is ever complete
  • world is too complicated
  • no perfect perspective
• No one’s perspective can be completely ignored
  • has some value to that person in that time and place
• Infinite number of alternative constructions
  • If yours is not working well, pick another

Approach

• personal constructs
• make the world meaningful to us
• serve as hypotheses
• person as scientist
• trying to understand the world

Personal Construct Theory

• If constructs appear to fit our subsequent experience, we keep them
• We respond to environment by actively processing info into new forms

Actively construct reality

• An individual’s behavior is determined not simply by environment or heredity; also by attitudes, expectations and beliefs
• We choose from alternative constructs
• Free to change constructs in an effort to make sense of reality and to predict and control world

Construct

• place an interpretation on an event
• anticipate events by interpreting them
• construction system organized
• embraces ordinal relationships between constructs
• organize constructs in series of ordinal relationships
• constructs fall into organized patterns, not isolated constructs
• permeable (open to change); can be altered. Some are more permeable than others
• concrete constructs are rather difficult to change; very specific in definitions and range
• Constructs are difficult to change
  • particularly if based on relatively few experiences (narrowly conceived)
• Constructs can appear to be incompatible with each other
  • that’s why we’re often surprised by other’s behavior and can’t always infer what going to do tomorrow based on how behave today

4. Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

Life

• Born and raised in Neuchatel, Switzerland
• interested in biology and zoology
• Ph.D. in biology
• worked for Binet at the Sorbonne (first intelligence test)
• Children don’t solve problems like adults do
• Children are not miniature adults
• have their own distinctive style of thinking which develops in stages

Four stages of cognitive development:

Sensorimotor stage

• first two years of a child’s life
• acquire motor control
• learn to interact with objects
• adapt to the world

Peroperational stage

• ages 2 to 7
• acquire language
• thinking is egocentric
• contradict themselves but are not bothered by it
• can name objects, think intuitively, and argue their point of view
• cannot argue from someone else’s point of view
• no conservation
• believe that tall and thin containers hold more than short, fat ones)
• magical thinking

Concrete operational stage

• ages 7 to 12
• can manipulate numbers
• develop rules for classifying objects
• acquire conservation (e.g., know that shape is not the same as quantity).

Formal operational stage

• ages 12 to adult
• acquire abstract thinking
• discuss hypothetical situations
• perform systematic searches for solutions
• Piaget’s Clinical Method
• Piaget: What makes the wind?
• Julia (5 yrs old): The trees.
• Piaget: How do you know?
• Julia: I saw them waving their arms.
• Piaget: How does that make the wind?
• Julia (waving her hand in front of Piaget’s face): Like this. Only they are bigger. And there are lots of trees.

Theory

• Children don’t solve problems like adults
• Have their own distinctive style of thinking
• Thinking develops in stages
• Schema
• patterns
• how tend organize thinking processes
• reflexes are built-in schemas

2 types of changes to schema

Assimilation

• Interpreting the world in terms of current schemes. The part of adaptation in which the external world is interpreted
• Slight alteration of new information in order to fit it into existing schema
• Kangaroo  à bunny

Accommodation

• Creating  new schemes or changing old ones to make into account new aspects of the environment.  à equilibrium, disequilibrium
• Kangaroo  à funny bunny

Equilibration

• The back-and-forth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium that occurs throughout development. A better fit with the environment

Organization

• The process of linking schemes into a strongly interconnected system, so they can be applied jointly to the environment

Scaffolding

• Framework to support learning
• Term coined by Bruner

5. Lev Vygotsky

• Zone of proximal development