Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Autobiographical retrieval has been modeled as a predictive retrieval process, in which strategies elaborate the original retrieval cue relying on information accessed in knowledge structures to direct the search. Previous studies have demonstrated that event concepts differ in their utility in this process. The present study examines the type of information made available by accessing two such event concepts, activities and general actions. Activity structures are shown to enable more concrete predictions about included objects, people, and setting information, while general actions tend to be associated with internal mental states. These differences in available features are consistent with previously observed retrieval time differences between these types of concepts and support a general underlying mechanism of predictive inferencing in retrieval. The results suggest the types of information that computer models of memory organization should utilize in their representations of event structures and the reasoning mechanisms that depend on those structures.