In an effort to understand what it means to be a girl, maria creates the schema that all girls have long hair. when maria meets jared, a boy in her preschool who has long hair, maria becomes confused. maria's confusion may be due to a process piaget called

Maria's confusion may be due to a process from Piaget's theory known as accommodation. 

Accommodation refers to the cognitive process wherein an individual's existing schema (such as long-haired people are girls) no longer works and needs to be modified to deal with new situations or objects. In this example, Maria's schema or existing knowledge of whom long-haired people are no longer includes just girls, it has now been modified to include boys too.