por What are cognitive schemas?
The cognitive schemas They are structures with which the brain organizes the information it acquires. They contribute to understanding what is perceived from the environment, from oneself or what is done, while allowing memory and learning to happen.
They have to do with the subject’s previous experience and the way in which he interprets what surrounds him. For example, it can be complex to define chair, but in general we all have a mental scheme with which we represent it.
The representation of the object is what will allow a chair to be recognized when seen, and not be confused with another object. The chair in front of you is real and unique, while the schematic is just a general representation of all the chairs.
Human beings have cognitive schemas for virtually everything we experience in life and have interacted with. These schemes are not static, they communicate with each other, feed back, change and refine themselves. They are very valuable complex structures.
Functions of Cognitive Schemas
Serve as cognitive support for information processing. LSchemas offer a frame of reference to assimilate all the new information. What is already schematized gives meaning and support to the new information incorporated.
They help distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information. They allow you to classify new information according to its relevance, to direct attention only to what is useful.
Enable inferences and contextual understanding. Dan meaning to the implicit, by finding relationships between different ideas or new concepts with those already processed.
Guide the organized search for new information. The previous schemes about the known guide the information search process.
They help to synthesize the information received. The previous cognitive schemes will allow distinguishing the main ideas from the secondary and complementary ones, facilitating their hierarchy and summary.
Collaborate with the reconstruction of lost information. It is common that, when trying to process new information, the subject encounters slips or forgetfulness, which make it difficult to understand and assimilate said information. The usefulness of the previous schemes allows us to test hypotheses that help generate or regenerate these concepts.
Characteristics of cognitive schemas
Organization of information. They help organize information into categories and patterns. This allows people to quickly recognize familiar situations and relate new information to what they already know.
Influence on perception. Because they affect the way we perceive and understand the world, they can lead us to pay more attention to certain aspects of a situation and ignore others, based on our previous experiences and expectations.
selective interpreting. They can generate biased interpretations of reality. People tend to interpret information in ways that fit their existing schemata, which can lead to misunderstandings or distortions.
Fill gaps. They also help fill in the gaps in our understanding. When faced with incomplete information, we tend to infer missing details based on our preexisting schemata.
Resistance to change. People may show resistance to accepting new information that contradicts their existing schemas.
Change of schemes. However, while schemas tend to be stable, they can also change over time due to new experiences, additional information, or a conscious effort to change them.
affect memory. They influence how information is stored and retrieved in memory. Information that fits our schemas is remembered better and details that don’t fit are often forgotten.
stability and flexibility. They can be stable and persistent, but they can also adapt and change with new experiences and learning.
Impact on learning. They have an important role in the learning process. New knowledge is assimilated and related to previous schemes, which facilitates the understanding and retention of information.
Application in problem solving. They also influence how problems are approached and decision making. We use schematics to identify patterns and apply previously successful solutions to similar situations.
Types of Cognitive Schemas
Sensory schemata or frames
They are schemes that we have about the different sensory stimuli. There is an outline of what a good or bad smell or taste is, of sounds (low, high, meowing, the voice of a singer), of textures (smooth, rough), etc.
Within this type of schemes, the visual ones are the most common and the easiest to verbalize, since it is more difficult for an average subject to make another understand what his scheme of a taste, a smell or a texture is like.
Situational schemes or scripts
They are related to concrete actions that can be carried out. For example, the schemas on how to sit in the usual way or in a fancy restaurant are situational schemas. These types of schemes apply to any action that can be carried out by humans, whether or not they have been carried out.
domain schemes
It refers to the formal knowledge that one has on certain topics and allows one to interact with its elements, establish causal relationships, detect errors and more. The example of what a chair is would be a domain schema.
Another example, the scheme of the phases of the rain cycle, should not be confused with a situational scheme because it is not an action that can be carried out by humans. Along the same lines, knowing how a car is made would be a domain scheme, but replicating the process would be a situational scheme.
A writer has situational schemata for how to write a good short story. This pattern is applied when you type. But when this writer reads a story by another author, what allows him to distinguish if it is a good story or not are his own mastery schemes on the subject. Obviously, for different contexts, the types of schemas vary.
Thanks to mastery schemas, the person can express what he knows and how he knows it in an understandable way.
social schemes
They are the schemes that are held on each of the components of social life. They could be confused with situational schemata, since many of the situations that are schematized are of a social nature, but both refer to different pieces of information within the social context.
In social schemas, for example, information is stored about every person you meet, and even about the types of people you can meet.
So, you have a schema about each family member, friend or colleague and even about celebrities and public figures, but also about what is, for example, a miser.
In this way, one would speak of a situational scheme if the information is about how to handle a conversation with someone intolerant. However, it would be social if it focused on what a intolerant person is like. Finally, it would be a dominance scheme if it focused on the sociological bases of intolerance.
These schemas store information about social conventions (for example, gratitude as a positive value), social roles (what does a policeman, a lawyer, an astrologer do), gender (for example, what is masculine), age, creed, etc., as well as social goals (what is meant by full life).
Finally, they allow us to understand social issues from a personal perspective. For example, what each one understands by love or friendship (how he feels it inside himself, instead of how much theory he knows on the subject). All this allows the subject to effectively integrate into his society, maintaining his mental health.
Self-concept schemata
They refer to all the information that each one handles about himself. Some authors consider it a more specific type of social scheme, since the self is framed in the social, and what one is cannot be separated so easily from the social context that surrounds it.
In the theory of mind, it is conceived that the subject creates schemes about how his mental processes work (for example, sadness), but he understands that these mental processes, although unique and non-transferable, work in the same way in others. Thus, understanding one’s own sadness allows one to understand that of the other and to interact.
Each subject has a scheme about each of their social roles, which will allow them to understand that of others. Thus, it will have a scheme of gender, creed, ideology, social function, etc. From here the self-concept, self-esteem, sense of belonging and more will emerge.
From this perspective, metacognition (the cognition one has of cognitive processes) is a type of self-concept schema. Thanks to this, the person can know how he learns best, how good a memory he has, etc.
References
Well, J. Cognitive theories of learning. Editorial Morata. Spain.
Schema (psychology). Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.
Computational theory of mind. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.
Cultural schema theory. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.
Social schemas. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.