ABSTRACT
While originating from the senses, knowledge is not a blind record of sensory inputs. Normal people are not tape recorders, or video recorders; rather, they seem to process and reprocess information, imposing on it and producing from it knowledge which has structure. Schemata are data structures for representing the generic concepts stored in memory. They exist for generalized concepts underlying objects, situations, events, sequences of events, actions, and sequences of actions. Just as certain characteristics of the actors are specified by the play-write, so too a schema contains, as part of its specification, information about the types of objects that may be bound to the various variables of the schema. In much the same way as the entries for lexical items in a dictionary consist of other lexical items, so the structure of a schema is given in terms of relationships among other schemata.
