Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A model of memory and learning is presented which indexes a new event by those features which are relevant in explaining why the event occurred. As events are added to memory, generalizations are created which describe and explain similiarities and differences between events. The memory is organized so that when an event is added, events with similar features are noticed. An explanation process attempts to explain the similar features. If an explanation is found, a generalized event is created to organize the similar events and the explanation is stored with the generalized event.