Abstract: Publisher Summary A fundamental aspect of the structure of material contained within a large, intelligent memory system is that the contexts, in which units of the stored information are accessed, are critically important in determining the way that information is interpreted and used. Most of the schemes, currently under active consideration, can be viewed as variants of list structures or semantic network structures. This chapter discusses some implications of these memory structures in regard to how the connections among different memory units are formed and interpreted, and some of the issues of processing that arise when these memory structures are used. It also discusses the nature of memory reference processes that can lead automatically, without particular effort, to the richness of the retrievals that it is believed to be a fundamental property of human memory. When two or more processes use the same resources at the same time, they may both interfere with one another, neither may interfere with the other, or one may interfere with a second without any interference from the second process to the first. The important principle is that a process can be limited in its performance either by the amount of available processing resources, such as memory or processing effort, or by the quality of the data available to it. Competition among processes can affect a resource-limited process, but not a data-limited one.