A group of 144 kindergarten and third grade students heard stories in which the information necessary to infer the protagonist's motives was varied as to its form and location in a story sequence. In all story variations, the semantic content of the information was held constant. All children completed three tasks: a moral judgment concerning the goodness or badness of the protagonist's behavior, recall of the entire story, and a series of probe questions about the story events. The results indicated that information related to motives was recalled equally well independently of where it occurred in the story or in what category it was placed. Similar results were found when moral judgment scores were analyzed. The form or location of information did not alter moral evaluations. The data suggest that prior findings on differential recall of story categories depend on uncontrolled content and the relation among statements to the main goal rather than the form or location of the category. (Author/DF)