Event Concepts

Just as objects have a conceptual structure that can be ex- pressed in terms of category membership, so also do various kinds of events, such as going to a movie or going to a restaurant. Schemas have been proposed as ways of representing such categories, allowing us to encode our knowledge about stereotypic events according to their parts. For instance, going to a movie involves going to the theater, buying the ticket, buying refreshments, seeing the movie, and returning from the theater. Schank and Abelson (1977) proposed versions of event schemas that they called scripts, based on their observation that many events involve stereotypic sequences of actions. The components of a script for dining at a restaurant, based on their hunch as to what the stereotypic aspects of such an occasion might be.
Bower, Black, and Turner (1979) reported a series of experiments in which the psychological reality of the script notion was tested. They asked participants to name what they considered the 20 most important events in an episode, such as going to a restaurant. With 32 participants, they failed to get complete agreement on what these events were. No particular action was listed as part of the episode by all participants, although considerable consensus was reported.
Bower et al. (1979) went on to show that such action scripts have a num- ber of effects on memory for stories. They had participants study stories that included some but not all of the typical events from a script. Participants were then asked to recall the stories (in one experiment) or to recognize whether various statements came from the story (in another experiment). When recall- ing these stories, participants tended to report statements that were parts of the script but that had not been presented as parts of the stories. Similarly, in the recognition test, participants thought they had studied script items that had not actually been in the stories. However, participants showed a greater tendency to recall actual items from the stories or to recognize actual items than to mis- recognize foils that were not in the stories, despite the distortion in the direc- tion of the general schema.
In another experiment, these same investigators read to participants stories composed of 12 prototypical actions in an episode; 8 of the actions occurred in their standard temporal position, but 4 were rearranged. Thus, in the restaurant story, the bill might be paid at the beginning and the menu read at the end. In recalling these stories, participants showed a strong tendency to put the ac- tions back into their normal order. In fact, about half of the statements were put back. This experiment serves as another demonstration of the powerful effect of general schemas on memory for stories.
These experiments indicate that new events are encoded with respect to general schemas and that subsequent recall is influenced by the schemas. One might be tempted to say that participants were misrecalling the stories, but it is not clear that misrecalling is the right characterization. Normally, if a certain standard event, such as paying a check at a restaurant, is omitted in a story, we
are supposed to assume it occurred. Similarly, if the storyteller says the check was paid before the meal was ordered, we have some reason to doubt the story- teller. Scripts or schemas exist because they encode the predominant sequence of actions making up a particular kind of event. Thus, they can serve as a valuable basis for filling in missing information and for correcting errors in information.
■ Scripts are event schemas that people use to reason about prototypical events.