Schema and Script

What it is

Schemas draw on two kinds of memory. Semantic memory holds general facts, and episodic memory holds personal experiences. A schema for a restaurant, for example, joins what restaurants are with the occasions on which a person has eaten in them. A script is the same idea applied to action: an ordered set of expected steps that tells a person what usually happens next.

In consumer behaviour, the textbook by Cathy Neal, Pascale Quester and Del Hawkins treats a brand's schema as its brand image, meaning what a person thinks and feels on hearing the name. It also notes that organisations sometimes teach customers a new script, as banks did when cash machines and phone and internet banking arrived.

In Why We Remember, Charan Ranganath describes how stored knowledge about how events usually unfold shapes what people notice and recall.

In effect

In the article on why readers call The Lord of the Rings the best book ever written, schemas explain part of why a built world is easy to follow. A reader who has learned how the book's places, peoples and histories fit together carries a schema for the world and can predict, fill gaps and notice what is new. The same idea underlies perceived realism, where consistency with a story's own rules lets the audience keep building a picture without stopping to repair it.

What it does not say

It does not say that everyone holds the same schema for the same thing. Schemas come from personal experience, so they differ between people and cultures. It also does not describe a fixed structure that can be read off a person; it is a way of describing how prior knowledge shapes what comes next.

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