RETHINKING THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATION IN PERSON MEMORY - AN INDEPENDENT TRACE STORAGE MODEL

How do people represent information about others in memory when they form impressions? Previous answers to this question have been nearly unanimous in the model they describe: Subjects forming an impression of a person interpret that person's behavior in terms of the traits it exemplifies. When several behaviors exemplify the same trait, subjects organize those behaviors in memory into a trait-based category (e.g., Hamilton, 1989; Srull & Wyer, 1989). The present experiments challenge this organized representation model of impression formation, and show instead that a better account of the data from impression formation studies is provided by a model in which behaviors exemplifying the same trait are stored independent of one another in memory. A unique feature of this model is the primary role it gives to retrieval factors, rather than the structure of the representation, in determining organization in subjects' recall of behaviors.