Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Cognitive Processes in Audience Decision Making 119

Schema Activation

Schema Activation in Decision Making and Discourse Comprehension

Schema activation is at the heart of information processing in general and of decision making and

discourse, or text-level, comprehension in particular. Some cognitive scientists assert that the whole

activity of “information processing may be seen as consisting of schema formation or activation,

of the integration of input with these schemas, and of the updating or revision of these schemas

to accommodate new input.”^142 Moreover, they say, “information processing cannot be carried

out without them.” Others see schema activation at the heart of the decision-making process.^143

After an extensive review of the research on both decision making and reasoning, cognitive scien-

tist John R. Anderson confi rms that decision making and reasoning are not the application of the

content-free rules of logic, syllogistic reasoning, or statistics as they are commonly thought to be,

but are essentially schema-based processes.^144

Brain Regions Activated. Neuroscientists fi nd that schemata develop gradually as networks of

neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of both brain hemispheres (see Figure 3.5 , p. 108).

Once schemata are developed and activated, they can be updated with new information very

rapidly via an interaction between the mPFC and the hippocampus, a structure located inside the

middle region of both temporal lobes.^145 In one fMRI study, beginning second-year biology and

education students were scanned as they read new information that was either related or unrelated

to schemata they had acquired in their fi rst-year courses. The extent of schema-related activation

in each student’s mPFC predicted their subsequent performance in their second-year courses.^146

Damage to the lower portion of the mPFC, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), can

make it diffi cult for patients to keep inappropriate schemata from being activated and can result in

confabulation.^147 In fMRI studies of multi-attribute decision making, that is, the type of decision

making described in our model, schema-related activation, with a selective boosting of deci-

sion-relevant attributes, has also been observed in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), an area

at the top of the prefrontal cortex (see Figure 3.4, p. 108).^148 Damage to the dlPFC causes dramatic

impairments to decision making, especially to multi-attribute decision making.^149

In addition to giving audiences a framework for decision making, schemata provide them with

the interpretive framework for comprehending written discourse,^150 spoken dialog,^151 and graphi-

cal displays.^152 Cognitive scientists Michelene Chi and Stellan Ohlsson fi nd that “Comprehension

as normally understood results in the construction of a specifi c instance of a schema or the accretion

of schema-relevant facts. New information is assimilated to existing schemas.”^153 Neuroscientists

fi nd that unlike sentence-level comprehension, which is primarily a left hemisphere activity, dis-

course comprehension routinely involves both hemispheres of the brain.^154

Much of what we know about the cognitive processes involved in schema activation comes from

research on audiences reading texts in order to comprehend them. Studies demonstrate that com-

prehending the meaning of texts as opposed to comprehending individual sentences depends upon

schema-level processing. One prominent model of reader comprehension consists of processes that

fi rst activate an appropriate schema after which “the schema slots are fi lled in with the information

from the passage.”^155 Other research demonstrates that schemata strongly infl uence not only what

readers comprehend when reading a text^156 but also what they remember from it.^157

Many different types of schemata are activated in the discourse comprehension process. One

type of schema, often called a script , provides a framework for understanding events. In an effort to

discover the script for dining at a restaurant, 32 people were interviewed separately and asked about

the major steps involved in dining out. The restaurant script of all 32 contained the same six steps:

sitting down, looking at the menu, ordering, eating, paying the bill, and leaving.^158 Other schemata

provide frameworks for understanding specifi c genres such as fairy tales or biographies. If expert