Let's look at two examples. What do you associate with the word "politician"? The schema that most people have of politicians contains the notion that they are dishonest.
What mental representation do you have about a fashion model? Most people think of a female with a near consuming obsession about her appearance. These are schemas that we have created in our minds through our prior experience with these persons.
Another term for a schema, when it is applied to people or objects, is a prototype. People's prototype of the typical politician, for example, contains the expectation that he or she will lie.
A common finding in psychological research is that a person's memory tends to be distorted by his or her schema of people or events. For example, federal investigators often have to interview eyewitnesses who have seen plane crashes. Experience has taught federal investigators that many eyewitnesses will report that flames were shooting out of the plane's engines, regardless of whether or not that actually happened. People report flames because it is part of their schema of a plane crash. Because they associate it with a plane crash, they will often falsely remember it as having occurred when it never did.
These notions of how stereotypes may promote tacit inferences, if confirmed, are an example of schematic processing. A schema is a mental representation of an object, person, or event based on past experience. A schema contains information associated with that object.
