The proposed research is concerned with with basic processes that underlie the use of social information in forming impressions and making inferences. It continues an exploration of three questions currently under investigation: (1) the factors that determine how information about people and events is encoded into memory and the effects of this encoding on subsequent judgments; (2) the cognitive organization of information about people and events, and (3) the role of processing objectives in the storage and retrieval of social information. In addition, we propose to investigate (4) the role of subjective (e.g., affective or emotional) reactions in social information processing and the cognitive representation of social experience, (5) the organization of beliefs acquired in different knowledge domains, and the factors that determine which previously formed beliefs are retrieved and used as bases for others, and (6) the cognitive representation of ongoing social interaction sequences involving oneself as either participant or observer. A multiplicity of procedures will be used, which range from the use of recall, recognition and reaction time data to assess the manner in which information is organized in memory and the ease of retrieving it for use in making judgments, to a content analysis of ongoing social interactions and the relation of this content to participants' perceptions of one another and interpretation of the interaction. Although this research is multifaceted, it all bears either directly or indirectly on implications of the general theoretical formulation we have developed. On the other hand, the research proposed is germane to several fundamental questions related to encoding, organizational and retrieval operations that are strongly emphasized in recent attempts to develop process models of social perception.
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