ABSTRACT

The intellectual journeys began first, a rising young professor at Stanford and a graduate student at the University of Michigan. It is not surprising that the graduate student was acquainted with Gordon’s research. More surprising is that Gordon was acquainted with my meager output. As a contrary graduate student skeptical of the claims of her elders, my dissertation challenged the idea that memory for the visuospatial world had to be transformed to a linguistic code to achieve permanence (Tversky, 1969). I like to say that Gordon discovered me, though not at the proverbial Hollywood coffee shop but through a mailing list. The Human Performance Center, where I was a student, sent copies of dissertations to a wide group that included Gordon Bower, and he read them! I was soon astonished to see that work described in a seminal chapter he wrote on imaginal representations and mnemonic devices (Bower, 1972).