ABSTRACT
An adequate theoretical account of how social information is organized in long term memory must be able to accommodate the diversity of information that is stored. Some information we acquire consists of entire sequences of causally and temporally related events that we have either experienced personally or learned about from others. Our mental representations of such experiences may often be very complex. For example, a woman who is asked about a party she went to last week may be able to provide a detailed description of particular episodes that occurred (e.g., an incident in which a guest spilled a Bloody Mary on his girl friend’s new white dress). The mental representation she retrieves and uses as a basis for this description may consist in part of a mental image of the people involved in it as well as the sequence of actions that took place (for discussions of visual representations of information in memory, see Klatzky, 1984; Kosslyn, 1980). In other words, it may consist of both verbally and visually coded features that are both spatially and temporally organized in relation to one another.
