This study assessed the holistic and fragmented retention and forgetting of event models. We report four experiments that manipulated causality, co-reference, events versus objects, and description determinacy. While increased causal connections among events increased holistic remembering, there was no clear effect for manipulations of co-reference, events versus objects, or determinacy. Thus, our work suggests that there are limits to the extent to which different types of events are remembered and forgotten in a holistic or fragmented manner. That said, all of our event did show significantly greater than chance holistic remembering, suggesting that the very act of creating event models leads these memories to be remembered or forgotten as wholes to a greater extent.

One aspect of context on cognition and memory that has been understudied is the influence of temporal context. The temporal contexts used in this study were different times of the year. More specifically, given that we were dealing with a largely Roman Catholic population, we operationalized temporal context in terms of two religious seasons, Lent and Ordinary Time. For this study, we assessed experience of, and memory for, representational and abstract art as a function of whether there was temporal congruity or incongruity. Temporal context did influence memory for perceptual details but not the experience of art during viewing, or gist and autobiographical memory. Thus, temporal context can influence cognition, but the scope of this influence is limited.

In a recent commentary, Nespolo (2003) makes reference to his personal experience as exattendant to the course of evolution imparted by Dr. Humberto Maturana and Dr. Jorge Mpodozis at the Facultad de Ciencias of the Universidad de Chile to construct a negative criticism of Chilean undergraduate teaching of evolution. As ex-attendants of the mentioned course of evolution we have had an experience that is directly comparable to that of Dr. Nespolo. Here we wish to point out our opinion regarding this course, which is markedly different. First, it is a caricature to state that in this course natural selection is taught as being wrong. A serious and critical revision of natural selection, the synthetic theory, and evolutionary ecology is a fundamental part of the course. These and other topics are presented by researchers from those fields, such as Drs. Germán Manríquez and Rodrigo Medel. The scientific contributions of both researchers receive positive comments in Nespolo (2003).