Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we present a model of how events and their partic-ipants are represented in working memory (WM). The model’scentral assumption is that events are experienced through se-quentially structured sensorimotor (SM) routines—as are theindividuals that participate in them. In the light of this assump-tion, we propose that events and individuals are stored in WMas prepared SM routines. This proposal allows a new mech-anism for binding representations of individuals to semanticroles such as AGENT and PATIENT. It also enables a novelaccount of how expectations about forthcoming events can in-fluence SM processing in real time as events are perceived.Finally, it supports an account of the interface between WMrepresentations and language.