The Cognitive Representation of Mundane Social Events

An important issue in the event memory area concerns the effects of prior knowledge on how newly encountered event sequences become represented in memory. The following experiments address two relevant questions. First, when people encounter events that exemplify a schema, do they copy instantiations of schema-defining concepts into the representation they form? Second, when people encounter schema-unrelated events, do they encode these events separately, or do they associate them with events that exemplify the schema? I hypothesize that when people encounter events that exemplify a schema, they usually do not copy instantiations of schema-defining events into the representation they form. This happens only when a schema-unrelated event is encountered that requires knowledge of a defining event in order to localize the point in the overall sequence at which it occurred. Two experiments provided preliminary support for the theory. Four other experiments tested further its implications.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

1993

Author dc:creator

• Trafimow, David Aaron

Contributors dc:contributor

• Wyer, Robert S., Jr.

• Psychology, Social
• Psychology, General
• Psychology, Experimental

Identifier

(UMI)AAI9314952

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/72121