In many fields, advances in tools and technology open new doors of investigation. As more sophisticated means of analysis become widely used, researchers are able to ask new and different questions. This has certainly been the case with the biological and physical sciences, and so it is with cognitive science. Now that hardware with expanded computational power is generally available to cognitive scientists, together with a variety of computer analyses and modeling procedures to take advantage of the speed and capacity of these machines, the types of questions addressed in research are changing.

One of the major contributions of cognitive science research to studies of cognition is the shift in the way that different cognitive processes are studied. The importance to schema theory is that the techniques of cognitive science facilitate the investigation of unobservable cognitive activity by allowing tests of hypotheses through simulation. In general, computer models are used to simulate various cognitive phenomena, and these models introduce several breaks with traditional practice. For one thing, they frequently focus on one individual at a time in great depth. For another, they require much more fine-grained detail than models used in the past.

Some of the limitations of the early work on schemas become strikingly evident when one faces the task of creating an explicit computer model of a particular schema. The characteristics of a schema, such as those illustrated in chapter 1, have not been determined at the detailed level required for computer modeling.