Developing Structures

People have widely differing experiences and must deal with a variety situations in the world. To keep track of these things, each person must create and maintain his own memory and processing structures. No one single set or configuration of structures can be used to explain the diversity of understanding and skills that we see in the world. It seems quite unlikely, then, that any particular structures are innate, though the ability to form and manipulate such structures may very well be.

No two people are likely to have identical structures except when those structures reflect the physical nature of the world or when those two people must function in identical societal arrangements. Even then, our individual experiences alter our view of the world to such an extent that we can still expect major differences. Each person's mental structures will contain distinct personal experiences and different expectations. Thus, we can expect people to have rather idiosyncratic TOPs, MOPs, scenes, and scriptlets. How do these structures get built in the first place? How do existing structures get altered once they have been built? How do new structures get created out of a reorganization of old structures?

To build our own memory structures, we must be able to recognize that a current experience is in some way similar to one that has occurred previously and we must be able to focus on the important aspects of both episodes and eliminate from consideration those aspects of the current situation that are irrelevant to the retrieved memory.