This study explored the representation that readers construct when advancing through the description of an unfolding occurrence. In 3 experiments, participants read narratives describing a sequence of events and at a certain moment were tested for the accessibility of an entity from a past event. Entities were less accessible when the temporal…

In contrast to exemplar and decision-bound categorization models, the memory and contrast models described here do not assume that long-term representations of stimulus magnitudes are available. Instead, stimuli are assumed to be categorized using only their differences from a few recent stimuli. To test this alternative, the authors examined…