ABSTRACT

People are sensitive not only to the particular events they have experienced, but also to the characteristics of those events taken as classes. There is general agreement about the principles governing the representation of information about particular events. We encounter objects in some context and for some purpose: the processing of the event is directed and constrained by the similarity of the current event to previous ones, the nature of the current task, the affordances of the object and the availability of attentional and processing resources. Memory stores a representation of the event, as the object was experienced in that context and task.