In her first trip to a zoo, 7-year-old latisha notices that leopards have paws very similar in shape to her cat snowball's paws. she also notices that leopards walk in much the same way that snowball does. latisha starts to wonder if perhaps leopards are cats. latisha's thinking illustrates piaget's idea that thought is characterized by:

In this case, Latisha is Use Schemes. Schemas are the basic components of memory, we use them to encode information during the learning process. We are born without information stored, therefore, we do not have schemes, as we grow we create more schemes and these become more rational. In this case, Latisha has a limited scheme of what felines are, which is why she considers her cat and leopard to be the same.