How are schemata created and modified?
Schemata are created through experience with people, objects, and events in the world. When we encounter something repeatedly, such as a restaurant, we begin to generalize across our restaurant experiences to develop an abstracted, generic set of expectations about what we will encounter in a restaurant. This is useful, because if someone tells you a story about eating in a restaurant, they don’t have to provide all of the details about being seated, giving their order to the server, leaving a tip at the end, etc., because your schema for the restaurant experience can fill in these missing details. Sometimes, details get filled in incorrectly. For example, Elizabeth Loftus did some research examining people’s recall for details after watching films of car accidents. Two groups of people saw exactly the same tape of a car accident. Both groups were asked a series of factual questions after the accident with only one difference – one of the groups was asked “How fast were the cars going
