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Shared knowledge
Task D - How is our shared knowledge organised?
Clearly, our shared knowledge comes from shared experience. Although
we all have personal experiences, individual to each of us, we all know
that many of those experiences are similar in various ways. Most of the
people you know at university will probably have attended different secondary
schools from you. But nonetheless, you will all have similar expectations
about what secondary schools are like, what the teachers are like, what
sorts of clothes they wear, how they behave, and so on. Hence the phrase
‘secondary school’ will conjure up a set of individual ‘pictures’
for each of us, but those pictures will have many similarities with the
‘pictures’ other people conjure up.
One possibility is that we store all our bits of knowledge in our brains
in an ‘unordered list’, as it were, but this seems unlikely.
It is difficult to see how we could efficiently conjure up all the different
elements of ‘restaurant’ or ‘school’, for example,
when one of these concept is raised in our minds through textual reference
or an image of the outside an appropriate building in a film. So the Psychologists
suggest that such knowledge is organised into what they call schemata.
In other words, we store the information about what lectures are like
in a lecture schema, information we have about cinemas in a cinema
schema, and so on.
Below you will find an image of the head of a typical student (!). Click
on the head and you can see (a little bit) of his schematic organisation.
You can see that we have used the visual metaphor of a filing cabinet
here. This is a helpful metaphor to use, as it raises the possibility
of similar schemas being filed near one another (in the same drawer, as
it were). If you think about your schema for a hotel service counter and
an airport check-in counter, for example, you can see that they share
various features. New arrivals go up to the counter with their bags in
each case and an official behind the desk checks them in. So in cognitive
retrieval terms, it would make sense for the two schemas to be organised
in memory in a way that relates them together - this would help us to
retrieve related schemata more easily. There is still an awful lot about
how memory is stored in the brain that is unclear, but the idea of organised
schematas certainly looks plausible, and we will use it in our account
of how we understand drama in this topic. On the next page, though, we
will first explore in a bit more detail the kinds of things we can have
schematic knowledge of.
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