Schema

The concept of schema originates in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where it functioned as a bridge between sensibility and concepts. Since then, it has become foundational to many constructivist theories of mind and memory. In the twentieth century, it became central in psychology mainly through the work of Bartlett and Piaget, who offered an alternative to the traditional storage notion of memory that goes back to Plato. Their pioneering experiments on memory illustrated the concept of schema’s utility to theorize memory as a constructive process. Contemporary psychology has likewise extended the concept in several different directions and applied it in different areas of research, of which we reviewed cognitive and sociocultural approaches. While the former typically saw it as being a structure in the head with nodes for receiving information or applying default values, social-cultural approaches saw it as being inherently social through which it is explored in both routine practices and narrative traditions.