Schemas are an extremely effective (but flawed) tool for understanding the world. Through the use of schemas, most everyday situations do not require effortful thought — automatic thought is all that is required. People can quickly organize new perceptions into schemas and act effectively without effort. For example, most people have a stairway schema, and can apply it to climb staircases they've never seen before.
However, schemas can influence and hamper the uptake of new information (proactive interference), such as when existing ...
The original concept of schemas (NB: in reality the plural of 'schema' is 'schemata') is linked with that of Reconstructive Memory as proposed and demonstrated in a series of experiments by Bartlett (1932). By presenting participants with information that was unfamiliar to their cultural backgrounds and expectations and then monitoring how they recalled these different items of information (stories etc), Bartlett was able to establish that individuals' existing schemata and stereotypes influence not only how they interpret 'schema-foreign' n ...
