Cognitive science and schema theory - Research Proposal Example

With these concepts, I have analyzed the reason of failure of Guild wars game launched in Korea. Guild wars game which was successful in US failed to localize in Korea because of failure to design their product for users in a different culture. We are all aware that knowing something about a subject makes it easier to learn more about that subject: our prior knowledge serves as a framework which makes the new information more meaningful and easier to absorb (Huckin 1983). In other words, every interactants social world is usually constituted within a framework of familiar and pre-acquainted knowledge about various situations.

This familiar and pre-acquainted knowledge is called schemas (or schemata). The concept of schemas is not new, but existed even in the 19th century: German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed the idea that each persons experiences are gathered together in memory, forming higher order concepts (Wolff 1963). In the last 25 years, the concept of schemas has been used and defined by quite a number of scholars. Cohen et al. (1993) for example, explain schemas as "packets of information stored in memory representing general knowledge about objects, situations, events, or actions" (p. 28). Schemas are classified into several types.

Among them, cultural schema theory is "the familiar and pre-acquainted knowledge one uses when entering a familiar situation in his/her own culture. Cultural schemas for social interaction are cognitive structures that contain knowledge for face-to-face interactions in a persons cultural environment." (Nishida 1999) A concept of cultural schema theory is one of the most important achievements in cognitive science which deals with human thought process. In this concept, the difficulty of sharing a common understanding between designers and users, and the importance of eliminating the gulf between them are pointed out.

It is the brain that keeps and stores any