Schemata

People may often encounter an abundance of information—across all of the senses. To focus attention and to minimize cognitive overload, an individual may use a generalized framework they’ve formed and modified during previous interactions with the world.

For instance, they avoid getting hit by a car based on their previous walking experience in urban settings. They look both ways and ensure that vehicles notice pedestrians in the crosswalk.

This event, a mental model of crossing streets, is also known as a schema—an organized representation for different categories of things, people, or events.

Here, the person didn’t expect to see a unicycle rider in the middle of heavy traffic. Their schema had not been updated to include that possibility, so they didn’t even notice the towering man!

Perhaps if they’d known that the circus was in town, they would have been primed for the occurrence. But at least they can now update their model.

However, not all schemas are as easy to change. For example, in the case of gender expectations, someone might have schemas related to how men and women “should” behave in the roles they are expected to fill.

If what they view is inconsistent with what they believe, instead of updating their schemas, they might hold on to their originally-held stereotypes, and even recall the scene incorrectly.

While schemas commonly encourage many to conserve mental energy and take action quickly and efficiently, they may also cause somebody to misinterpret particular situations, even circumstances outside of conscious awareness.