ABSTRACT
In 1975, via Ray Hyman’s study group at the University of Oregon, Steve Read was introduced to Bob Abelson’s work on knowledge representations and related work on understanding. “I remember reading one of Bob’s articles on scripts and getting very excited about it; I just knew ‘this was right’; I believed then that Abelson’s focus on the representation and use of mundane social knowledge was sadly missing from contemporary work in social psychology.” Moving to the University of Texas at Austin in 1977 (where Lynn was a graduate student), Steve found a flyer for a summer workshop run by Roger Schank and Bob Abelson that was sponsored by the Sloan Foundation. He applied, was accepted, and along with 30 other psychologists, endured “one of the most intellectually stimulating and draining months of my life.” Now Steve was fully “hooked” on the knowledge structure approach espoused so elegantly by Abelson and Schank. In 1979, after some conversations with Bob, Steve began a collaborative project with Bob and Nancy Cantor on social prototypes, which unfortunately did not pan out. The next year, he was awarded a National Science Foundation postdoctorate to work with Bob Abelson and members of the Cognitive Science Program at Yale. From 1981 to 1982, Steve spent an intellectually exciting year attending Bob’s research meetings and weekly meetings with the Yale artificial intelligence (AI) group. He worked with Bob on several fprojects and wrote a book chapter with John Black and Jim Galambos on text comprehension and social understanding. Meanwhile, by 1980, Lynn and Steve had married, and their research and theoretical interests, which were once miles apart, began to dovetail. Lynn was becoming more and more interested in the dynamics of social interaction (and ways of thinking about and studying it), but was becoming more and more frustrated by the seeming inability to get at the richness of individual lives and interpersonal relationships. With Steve at Yale, she attended Bob’s weekly meetings, and was introduced to the knowledge structure approach. Looking back, we realize how many seeds were being planted in those weekly meetings: Bob started a process and provided the theoretical tools (e.g., goals, plans, scripts, themes, etc.) and a theoretical bridge for thinking about how persons, relationships, and situations could be considered richly, within a common theoretical framework. Bob’s influence runs like a thread (sometimes a fairly thick one) through much of our subsequent work, both our individual contributions and our collaborative ones.
