POTENTIAL POWER OF CODING PARTICULAR EXPERIENCES - REPLY

R. C. Mathews and L. G. Roussel (1993) argued that it is more fruitful to understand memory as a ''conceptualizer,'' which enables the organ ism to interact efficiently with its environment, than as a simple ''w arehouse'' for storing the details of past experience. We completely a gree. However, Mathews and Roussel believe that the human capacity to acquire sensitivity to general properties of the environment requires a memory system that chronically abstracts regular aspects of the gene ral structure of experience. We argue that such abstraction is unneces sary. Instead, we argue, encoding particular experiences of encounteri ng the members of a domain accidentally makes memory sensitive to the general structure of that domain. In effect, simply coding particular experiences grants memory the potential to interact efficiently with c omplex and unanticipated aspects of its environment.