Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Schemas are mental representations of common structures of our experience, and they are centrally important to human thinking and memory. Recently, it has been proposed that schemas also play an important role in structuring our imagination of the future. However, tools for automatically measuring the schematic content of written and spoken event narratives are underdeveloped. Here, we report a preliminary investigation into a set of metrics that may differentiate between more and less schematic narratives. Across two experiments, we find that written and spoken narratives that are schema-congruent are more associative, in that they contain words that are more strongly psychologically associated with one another. We discuss how this finding might contribute to the development of tools to automatically measure schematicity in future narratives.