Research on the effects of child maltreatment and exposure to communityviolence suggests that children who experience these types of traumatic events may be at risk foralterations and biases in attention and memory similar to those that have been observed in adultssuffering from traumatic stress reactions. Along these lines, attachment theory posits thatrepresentational models of relationships also may act as moderators of similar cognitive biasesby selectively guiding children's attention to and processing of interpersonal stimuli.Building upon the trauma and attachment literatures, the present investigation examined the linksamong trauma, representational models of caregivers, and children's memory formother-relevant information using an incidental recall task in a sample of maltreated(n = 71) and nonmaltreated (n = 102) children between the ages of 8 and 13years.Results were consistent with the hypothesis that experiences of trauma and representationalmodels of caregivers are associated with differences in the way children process and retrieveinformation about positive and negative mother attribute words. In particular, experiences oftrauma initially were associated with increased insecurity in children's representationalmodels. Moreover, the interaction of traumatic experience and security of mental representationpredicted children's recall for mother attribute words: victimized children with insecuremodels recalled the highest proportion of negative mother stimuli. Trauma and mentalrepresentation did not have a consistent effect on structurally encoded aspects of recall. Resultswere discussed in terms of the ways in which children who have experienced trauma processinformation about their worlds. The importance of assessing functioning in multipledevelopmental domains when studying memory also was discussed.