In Piaget's theory of development, children construct a series of schemata, based on the interactions they experience, to help them understand the world.
[8] Early developments of the idea in psychology emerged with the gestalt psychologists (founded originally by Max Wertheimer) and Jean Piaget.
[9] In Piaget's later publications, action (operative or procedural) schémes were distinguished from figurative (representational) schémas, although together they may be considered a schematic duality.
[12] This concept was first described in the works of British psychologist Frederic Bartlett, who drew on the term body schema used by neurologist Henry Head in 1932.
Through the use of schemata, a heuristic technique to encode and retrieve memories, the majority of typical situations do not require much strenuous processing.
[15] The process, however, is not always accurate, and people may develop illusory correlations, which is the tendency to form inaccurate or unfounded associations between categories, especially when the information is distinctive.
[4] Nevertheless, schemata can influence and hamper the uptake of new information, such as when existing stereotypes, giving rise to limited or biased discourses and expectations, lead an individual to "see" or "remember" something that has not happened because it is more believable in terms of his/her schema.
Although this may suggest the possibility of subliminal messages, the effect of priming is so fleeting that it is difficult to detect outside laboratory conditions.
The original concept of schemata is linked with that of reconstructive memory as proposed and demonstrated in a series of experiments by Frederic Bartlett.
One of his most famous investigations involved asking participants to read a Native American folk tale, "The War of the Ghosts",[20] and recall it several times up to a year later.
All the participants transformed the details of the story in such a way that it reflected their cultural norms and expectations, i.e. in line with their schemata.
The factors that influenced their recall were: Bartlett's work was crucially important in demonstrating that long-term memories are neither fixed nor unchanging but are constantly being adjusted as schemata evolve with experience.
His work contributed to a framework of memory retrieval in which people construct the past and present in a constant process of narrative/discursive adjustment.
Much of what people "remember" is confabulated narrative (adjusted and rationalized) which allows them to think of the past as a continuous and coherent string of events, even though it is probable that large sections of memory (both episodic and semantic) are irretrievable or inaccurate at any given time.
Brewer and J.C. Treyens, who demonstrated that the schema-driven expectation of the presence of an object was sometimes sufficient to trigger its incorrect recollection.
Brewer and Treyens concluded that the participants' expectations that books are present in academics' studies were enough to prevent their accurate recollection of the scenes.
When he was trying to create solutions for some of the difficulties he encountered he came across Bartlett's work and concluded that if he was ever going to get machines to act like humans he needed them to use their stored knowledge to carry out processes.
In the 1980s, David Rumelhart extended Minsky's ideas, creating an explicitly psychological theory of the mental representation of complex knowledge.
[24] Roger Schank and Robert Abelson developed the idea of a script, which was known as a generic knowledge of sequences of actions.
This led to many new empirical studies, which found that providing relevant schema can help improve comprehension and recall on passages.
[26] However, schemas can also contribute to influential outside sociocultural perspectives, like the development of racism tendencies, disregard for marginalized communities and cultural misconceptions.
Piaget thought that schemata are applied to everyday life and therefore people accommodate and assimilate information naturally.
Piaget describes equilibrium as a state of cognition that is balanced when schema are capable of explaining what it sees and perceives.
According to Cox, Abramson, Devine, and Hollon (2012), these self-schemata are essentially the same type of cognitive structure as stereotypes studied by prejudice researchers (e.g., they are both well-rehearsed, automatically activated, difficult to change, influential toward behavior, emotions, and judgments, and bias information processing).
[40][41] Early maladaptive schemata are described by Young as broad and pervasive themes or patterns made up of memories, feelings, sensations, and thoughts regarding oneself and one's relationships with others; they can be a contributing factor to treatment outcomes of mental disorders and the maintenance of ideas, beliefs, and behaviors towards oneself and others.
Young said that CBT may be an effective treatment for presenting symptoms, but without the conceptual or clinical resources for tackling the underlying structures (maladaptive schemata) which consistently organize the patient's experience, the patient is likely to lapse back into unhelpful modes of relating to others and attempting to meet their needs.
Cognitive behavioral methods work to increase the availability and strength of adaptive schemata while reducing the maladaptive ones.