On the interplay between schemas and stories: How story schemas scaffold memory and constrain predictions

Abstract

Human beings demonstrate a universal impulse to share and consume stories. Over generations of transmission, within and across cultures, stories have evolved to develop certain regularities in their structures. Through the cumulative exposure to these shared, recurring structural features, people may develop internal counterparts: cognitive structures, or schemas, that capture stories’ structural regularities—in other words, story schemas in the mind. In this dissertation, I explore two ways these story schemas make themselves known: through their influence on memory, and through their influence on prediction. In Chapter Two, I explore the effects of story schema on people’s memory, using the highly popular Cinderella story form. I developed new natural language processing (NLP) techniques to track the evolution of novel stories as they were told and retold. I find evidence that stories that follow a culturally familiar structure, i.e., the Cinderella structure, are both more stable in a single reteller’s memory, and remembered more similarly across independent storytellers. This suggests that recall for such stories may be scaffolded by existing story schemas in the mind. And, given the similarity of people’s narrative experience with highly popular story forms, these story schemas may be shared—at least by people in similar cultural contexts. In Chapter Three, I adopt a developmental approach to track the emergence of story schemas’ influence on prediction. I generated novel stories modeled off of popular fables, for which we might expect corresponding story schemas in people’s minds. I find that, between the ages of 3 and 5, children increasingly predict the typical, i.e., schema-consistent, outcomes of these novel stories. This provides initial evidence for the progressive acquisition of story-relevant schemas, increasingly constraining people’s predictions across development. Together, these two chapters point to the existence of story schemas in the mind—scaffolding memory and guiding prediction as people engage with stories.