Schema

Schema is a technical term first used by psychologists in the 1930s to describe the interaction of perceptual and cognitive processes with environmental and experiential context. In psychology, a schema (pl. schemata) refers to the active organization of previous experiences that shapes a response to a stimulus in the environment. Schema theory has been used in numerous fields, including cognitive psychology, information science, pattern perception, music perception and cognition, and music theory. Music scholars have used schema theory to frame experimental research on the perception and cognition of the basic facets of tonal music (e.g., scales, keys, chords, and their contexts). More recently, music scholars have used the schema concept to form historically and psychologically informed interpretations of large bodies of musical repertoire.

Schemata are cognitive structures that are formed from mentally encoded statistical regularities. Schemata are hierarchical, active processes that receive input data and evaluate its goodness of fit, allowing one to have unconscious expectations about what objects, scenes, or events should look like, and the order in which they should occur. While some features (input data) are universally recognized, others are learned through cultural experience. Features and schemata have a reciprocal relationship. Features inform schemata selection, which in turn helps to detect additional features. When one encounters a feature, one eliminates all schemata with which that feature is not associated. One continues to accumulate features and eliminate schemata until an appropriate schema becomes apparent. Once this occurs, one's chosen schema allows one actively to seek out the remaining features. Having established a context for one's experience, one is able to begin the process of “filling in the blanks.” This process represents the activation of expectations.