The term, "schema," used largely as a descriptive convenience rather than a theoretical guidepost in social psychology is examined through an analysis of its development, function, and structure. This paper articulates a model of schema development in adults by defining a schema as a representation of some stimulus domain and a set of…

Four experiments (involving a total of 158 children) demonstrated observationally-induced learning effects on multidimensional conservation tasks using brief, single session training. First grade samples of middle class Anglo-American, and economically disadvantaged Mexican-American children displayed gains in vicariously-induced conservation as…

A basic unsolved problem in science is that of understanding learning, the process by which people and machines use their experience in a situation to guide future action in similar situations. The ideas of Piaget, Pavlov, Hull, and other learning theorists, as well as previous heuristic programing models of human intelligence, stimulated this…