Although the presentation below might represent a coherent account of how Piaget's theory of schemas operate, it might mislead people because schema theory has come a long way since Piaget. Indeed, for people working in AI, they date the origins of schema to Kant and use Frederic Bartlett's use of schema as their starting point. Minsky provides a re-interpretation for use in AI programming, Rumelhart & Norman reinterpreted it for contemporary cognitive psychology. There is an entry on "Schema (psychology)" on Wikipedia but in my opinion it is inadequate (a Google search turns up many sources for the development of schema in the past few decades). To see how Wikipedia treats this topic, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_%28psychology%29
Another view of the development of schema theory is provided by Gureckis and Goldstone in their entry on "Schema" in "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences"; See: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/pdfs/schemaforlanguage.pdf Goldstone makes a number of papers from his research group available on his website; see: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/papers.html He also provides access to 10 "classic" articles from the journal "Cognitive Science"; see: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/cogsci/classics.html People in AI might emphasize different aspects of the development of schema theory while people in education might trace the development through the work of R.C. Anderson. Even the Gestalists have been implicated in the development of the concept of schemas. So, in summary, maybe an accurate portrayal of Piaget's concepts but not of current schema theory. YMMV. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --------- Original Message -------------------- On Sun, 26 Jun 2011 09:47:54 -0700, Michael Britt wrote: As many of you probably heard, same-sex marriages are now legal here in New York. I've heard a few things lately that made me wonder whether the pro and con attitudes toward this issue didn't have something to do with Piaget's concept of schema, assimilation and accommodation. Feel free to let me know if you think I've got this right or if I'm off-base here. My guess is that if your scheme for the concept of "marriage" is primarily the idea that marriage is a union between a woman and a man, then you could easily assimilate a few variations on this, such as a) a union between an older man and a younger woman (and vice versa), and b) a union between a man of one color to that of a woman of another (again, and vice versa). You could easily assimilate these observations into your existing schema of "marriage". However, a union between and man and a man or a woman and a woman would probably require this person to accommodate - restructure their definition of "marriage". I'm guessing that for many people who have been brought up to have a tight definition of marriage (man and woman), the accommodation of this definition to include two people of the same sex is difficult. On the other hand, if your schema for "marriage" is primarily the idea that marriage is a union between two people who love each other, then a gay marriage is more a case of assimilation than accommodation. Am I right here? On a not unrelated note, I was recently watching the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie and I saw another example of assimilation vs. accommodation (got Piaget on the brain I guess). Early in this movie Jack Sparrow said to Will that Will's father was both "a pirate and a good man". Will had trouble accepting this because, from Piaget's perspective, the two schema, "pirate" and "good man" are very different and usually don't evoke each other. Will had trouble accommodating "pirate" to include "good man". Just checking to make sure this isn't too far fetched of an application of the concepts of schema, accommodation and assimilation. Feedback welcome. --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=11158 or send a blank email to leave-11158-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
