In a study of unconstrained recall, college students named as many acquaintances as possible in 10 min. One month later, they sorted these acquaintances into "person types" and into naturally occurring social groups. Timing results indicate that the subjects generated person memories in discrete bursts: After naming several acquaintances, they paused before naming several more. The temporal bursts were usually social groups. The process of unconstrained recall can be simulated by a simple model that samples items and traverses networks in a cognitive domain. After reproducing subjects' memory protocols with a computerized version of this sampling-traversal model, we consider alternative models and comment on the structure of naturally acquired person memories.

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