Schema Theory and the
Interpretation of Television Programmes

• Introduction
  
• Social Schemas
  
• Textual Schemas
  
• Ideological Schemas
  
• References
  
• Key Links
  

Introduction

• Schema theory seeks to explain our interpretation of the world from a psychological perspective which stems from cognitive science.
• Schemas (or schemata) are cognitive structures, rather like mental templates or 'frames', that represent a person's knowledge about objects, people or situations.
• Schemas are derived from prior experience and knowledge.
• They simplify reality, setting up expectations about what is probable in relation to particular social and textual contexts.
• We use schemas to organize our knowledge, to assist recall, to guide our behaviour, to predict likely happenings and to help us to make sense of our current experiences.
• According to schema theory, our interpretation of television programmes is guided by our application of relevant social and textual schemas.
• A schema can be envisaged as a kind of framework with 'slots' for 'variables', some of them filled-in and others empty.
• The slots are either filled in already with compulsory values (e.g. that a dog is an animal) or 'default values' (e.g. that a dog has four legs) or are empty (optional variables) until 'instantiated' with values from the current situation (e.g. that the dog's colour is black).
• When what seems like the most appropriate schema is activated, inferences are generated to fill in any necessary but inexplicit details with assumed values from the schema.
• If no relevant schema is retrieved from long-term memory a new schema is created. Explicit events and inferences, as well as new schemas, are stored in long-term memory.
• Schema-driven processing is a top-down perceptual process which guides a selective search for data relevant to the expectations set up by the schema.
• Schema-driven processing interacts with bottom-up data-driven processes (which may lead to the activation, modification or generatation of a schema).
• Schema theory is consistent with the notion of both perception and recall as constructive and selective cognitive processes.
• Schemas are culturally-specific: schemas for common routines vary socio-culturally - even within a single country.
• There are several kinds of schemas. In relation to television, these are most commonly divided into those relating to either knowledge of the world (social schemas concerning events, places and people) or knowledge of the medium (textual schemas including 'formal features' of television such as cuts).
• Narrative and genre conventions are sometimes offered as a third category (e.g. Collins 1981), but it is difficult to justify separating knowledge of these from knowledge of formal features of the medium.
• I will promote to my own third category ideological schemas (the concept itself being derived from Biocca, 1991).

Social Schemas

• The most well-known kind of schema is that for a familiar event (such as going to a restaurant).
• This is usually called a script (sometimes an event schema or a scenario).
• Scripts consist of a sequential list of the characteristic events involved in a common routine.
• They also include related props (such as menus), roles (such as waiter), enabling conditions (such as having money) and outcomes (such as feeling less hungry).
• Scripts are sometimes subdivided into 'scenes' (such as entering, ordering, eating and leaving a restaurant).
• Scripts are, of course, culturally-variable.
• Role schemas embody knowledge about sets of behaviours that are expected of people in particular social positions (e.g. occupation, age, race, gender). Stereotypes can be seen as role schemas for members of an identifiable group. They include gender stereotypes and racial stereotypes, but are not always negative.
• Person schemas contain knowledge about different types of people, including their personality traits and goals. They often refer to associated contexts.
• There are schemas for places such as an office or a kitchen (Mandler confusingly calls these scene schemas).
• Such location schemas include inventories of typical contents and conventional layouts or spatial relationships.

Textual Schemas

• A story schema represents our expectations about the way in which narratives (of various kinds) conventionally proceed.
• Story schemas are sometimes distinguished from story grammars - the underlying textual structures of formulaic narratives (stories consist basically of settings and episodes).
• Genre schemas organize knowledge about related kinds of texts (such as news bulletins and advertisements), including their structures and functions (such as to inform or persuade).
• Individuals differ in their familiarity with what semioticians call the 'codes' of particular genres (according to such factors as age, ethnicity and social background).
• In relation to television (as with any other medium), there are also schemas for the 'formal features' (editing and camerawork conventions) of the medium (such as cuts and zooms).

Ideological Schemas

• Mediating, in my view, between 'real-world' (social) and 'textual' schemas are ideological schemas (see Biocca 1991).
• Ideological schemas may also be closely linked to self-schemas (usually classified as one of the social schemas); people use self-schemas to organize knowledge about themselves. The self-schema is part of a viewer's own primary ideology (Biocca 1991: 71).
• Ideological schemas involve inferences about ideological assumptions implicit in media texts.
• They relate to the perceived intentions of programme-makers (within generic functions such as to inform, educate, persuade or entertain).
• In applying ideological schemas viewers assess whether or not the inferred world-view and ideology of a programme reflect their own.
• For children a parallel here is perhaps in assessing the reality status of texts.

References

• Biocca, Frank (1991): 'Viewers' Mental Models of Political Messages: Toward a Theory of the Semantic Processing of Television'. In Frank Biocca (Ed.): Television and Political Advertising, Vol. 1: Psychological Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 27-89
• Collins, W Andrew (1981); 'Schemata for Understanding Television'. In H Kelly and H Gardner (Eds.): New Directions for Child Development: Viewing Children Through Television, No. 13. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 31- 45

Daniel Chandler
April 1997