Person memory and person judgments based on categorically organized information

Acta Psychologica North-Holland

61 (1986)

117-135

PERSON MEMORY CATEGORICALLY Klaus FIEDLER University

of Giessen,

Accepted

July

117

AND PERSON JUDGMENTS ORGANIZED INFORMATION

BASED

ON

* FRG

1985

Free recall, cued recall, and rating-like judgments - conceived as alternative modes of expressing memorized information - were assessed in a person memory task. The target person had been described with respect to the presence or absence of 48 different interests (e.g., Mozart, sonatas, tennis, boxing) in 12 interest categories (e.g., music, sports). The number of interests (vs non-interests) per category was manipulated as well as the order of the three sub-tasks. The pattern of results can be explained within a categorical coding framework which suggests two functionally independent stages of recall: (a) access to a higher-order memory code on the category level, and (b) reconstruction of specific items within categories. In particular, judgments of the degree of interest in the abstract categories were only related to selective free recall on the categorical level but not specific level free recall. Cued recall of the degree of interest in specific items was only related to free recall on the specific level. Making the category judgments before the free recall task, rather than afterwards, increased the availability of categories but not specific items. And inconsistent patterns of interests impaired the cued recall of specific patterns within categories but did not affect the categorical level. A strong positivity effect (i.e., more interests recalled than non-interests) was also found, resembling the often noted advantage of positive information in other domains of cognitive psychology.

A main stream of the recent development in cognitive social psychology is concerned with the relation between person memory and person judgment (Hastie et al. 1980; Higgins et al. 1981). The theoretical approach is often a dyadic one: Either person judgment is regarded as the dependent variable that is influenced by the mediating processes of person memory (Ross and Sicoly 1979; Fox 1980; Reyes et al. 1980). Or person memory is treated as the dependent variable which causally reflects the effects of preceding judgments (Lingle and Ostrom 1979; Smith and Miller 1979). In both cases, theory construction can be * Author’s 10, D-6300

address: Giessen,

OOOl-6918/86/$3.50

K. Fiedler, FRG.

Psychological

0 1986, Elsevier

Science

Dept.,

University

Publishers

of Giessen,

B.V. (North-Holland)

Otto-Behaghel-Strasse

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characterized as an attempt to shed light on the dyadic relation between recall-test measures and judgmental measures, assuming that one kind of measure offers an explanation for the other one. Alternatively, it is argued here that recall as well as judgment tasks should be considered as different ways to express the same social knowledge and both should therefore be treated as dependent variables. When communicating about other people, we can choose between several response modes, depending on the pragmatic purpose of the communication.‘The receiver of the communication may be interested in integrative judgments about an individual on trait-like dimensions such as honesty or sociability and, hence, the response mode will resemble the typical experimental rating task. If a more concrete and extensive description of the individual on the behavorial level is required, person ‘judgment’ may take the form of a free recall task (i.e., enumerating instances of past behavior). Or the response mode may also resemble a cued-recall task as, for example, when the ‘judgment’ consists of describing the person with respect to specific topics prompted by interview’questions or cues. All these different response modes or modes of judgmental output are normally characterized by uncertainty, that is, by imperfect knowledge and the need to fill in memory gaps with inferences and guesses. (For instance, think of the case of an eye-witness who is required to tell more than he/she can really remember.) Granting this assumption, it becomes obvious that when two of the judgmental tasks (rating, cued recall, free recall) are performed in temporal succession, the inferences or guesses made during the first task can influence the judge’s responses on the second task. Therefore, each response mode should in principle have the power to influence the other, and attempts to explain one in terms of the other run the risk of becoming circular. Consequently, all three measures should rather be considered dependent (or interdependent) variables. Which theoretical framework, however, may be more useful for understanding the tendencies and biases that can be observed in the different response modes? One such framework, borrowed from traditional memory research (Cohen 1966; Bousfield 1953), is proposed in the present article, namely, the categorical coding conception. It is applicable in many situations where there is some categorical structure underlying the body of stimulus information. This is the case with any set of behaviour descriptions or observations that can be classified into

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trait-like categories or can otherwise be organized into meaningful clusters. For example, a teacher’s knowledge of students’ achievement may be organized by subject matters, parents’ knowledge of their children by moral or motivational categories, and our own social information about our friends or reference persons may be organized by attitude objects or common interests. The categorical coding framework rests on the assumption that when multiple instances of social information are encoded in memory, certain meaningful categories or clusters of recurring behavior are abstracted to reduce the amount of information to a manageable level. The idea is best illustrated with reference to the task situation of the experiment that will be reported below. Imagine an impression formation task in which 48 pieces of information about an individual’s interests and non-interests are presented briefly, without repetition. Of course, the amount and the density of such a series of stimulus information would surely exceed the judge’s memory capacity, if the memory code were built up at the level of the 48 original items. If, however, the categorical structure underlying the stimulus information can be abstracted, that is, if the 48 specific items (e.g., tennis, rowing, . . . Mozart, stereo) are recognized as belonging to 12 recurring categories (e.g., sports, music), the memory load is greatly reduced. Now the judge only has to encode information about 12 interest categories and can use his/her semantic knowledge to reconstruct the specific category contents. Thus, a two-stage recall process is assumed which consists of two qualitatively different and functionally independent subprocesses: (a) accessing the categorical code, and (b) reconstructing the specific category content using semantic knowledge. This mnemonic principle of categorical coding offers a plausible explanation for the surprisingly good recall performance with categorized lists (cf. Cohen 1966). Supporting evidence for the categorical coding theory stems from several sources. Perhaps the most obvious demonstration of the categorical nature of memory codes is the well-known clustering in free-recall protocols (Tulving 1968; Shuell 1969). Another finding from the free-recall paradigm is the so-called ‘some-or-none principle’ (Cohen 1966): Either no member of a category is recalled, or the probability is high that more than one member will be recalled, suggesting that access to the categorical code is the critical step in the recall process. In experiments using recognition tests, it has also been shown that re-

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sponse latencies are longer and ‘false alarms’ are more likely with distracters belonging to the same categories as the stimulus items (Herrmann et al. 1978). All these pieces of evidence point to abstracted categories - that were not presented as stimuli but actively inferred as the unit of memory organization. The notion of categorical coding was long ignored by social cognition researchers and only very recently have some promising demonstrations been reported (Pryor and Ostrom 1981; Srull 1983). Categorical coding supplements the prevailing schema models (Hastie 1980; Smith and Graesser 1981) in several ways. Most importantly, categorical coding is applicable to multi-category representations; to the memorization of new and transitory information for which no schemata exist but for which ad hoc categories have to be created; and to cases in which the processing within categories is effortful rather than automatic. In general, then, the important contribution of categorical coding may be especially evident whenever some structure has to be imposed on unfamiliar information as in the context of learning or change of living. The research reported below is concerned with three assumptions or psychological implications of the categorical coding framework: The functional independence assumption states, as already mentioned, that the two recall stages involve different cognitive operations. At the first stage, recall depends on the accessibility of the categorical code whereas at the second stage the reconstruction of specific items within categories largely depends. on older semantic knowledge. According to the ecoy1omy assumption, the second stage will only be reached if necesary. If, however, the experimental task only asks for information at the categorical level (e.g., rating the general degree of interest in sports), the cognitive effort of reconstructing specific information should be evaded. Finally, the categorization assumption states that categorizations (e.g., recognizing tennis and boxing as belonging to the same category, i.e., sportsjare the most important cognitive activity during stimulus encoding (cf. Wickens 1970). By the act of categorization, the stimulus items are linked with and integrated into higher-order memory units. Surely, this is just another variant of the common depth-of-processing idea (Craik and Lockhart 1972; Craik and Tulving 1975). In order to introduce the experimental predictions, the task situation must be outlined further. As already mentioned, the stimulus material consisted of 48 items representing either positive (‘is interested in x’) or

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negative instances (‘is not interested in y’). There were 12 different interest categories, each one comprising 4 specific items. In four categories, the target person was always interested; in four other categories, he was never interested; and in the remaining four categories, he was interested in two cases and in two cases he was not interested. These conditions will be referred to as positivie, negative, and inconsistent categories. According to the experimental instructions, all the information pertained to the same (male) individual, and the judges had to form an impression of that individual. They were not informed that the experiment would include recall tests. Actually, judges had to express their knowledge of the target’s sphere of interest in the three different response modes: (a) Ratings of the target person’s degree of interest in the 12 different categories. (b) A free-recall test in which they had to reproduce as many interest topics as possible, irrespective of whether the target was interested in a topic or not. (c) A cued-recall test in which all the 48 topics were again presented as cues, and they had to reproduce the target’s degree of interest (positive or negative) in each topic. To clarify the theoretical relations between these different measures, consider the systematic arrangement in fig. 1. There are four different blocks referring to four recall operations, with the two upper blocks pertaining to operations at the categorical level and the two bottom blocks pertaining to recall operations at the specific level. According to the categorical coding thesis, the recall process procedes downwards from top to bottom. That is, the interest categories (sports, music,. . .), in memory must be accessed before the specific interest topics (tennis, rowing, . . . stereo, Mozart, . . .) can be reconstructed. And the degree of interest (positive or negative) in the specific topics must similarly be reconstructed from knowledge of the general degree of interest in the categories. Thus, the information depicted in the upper part of fig. 1 provides the input, as it were, for reconstructing the information in the lower part, as indicated by the downward arrows. In a similar vein, the information in the two left-hand blocks provides the input for the recall operations depicted in the two righthand blocks: A high degree of (general) interest in, say, sports cannot

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MEMORY

FOR

/ Person

CONTENTS

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and person judgments

MEMORY

SPORTS

PAINTINGS

FOR

DEGREE

SPORTS:

positive

PAINTINGS:

inconsistent

MUSIC:

negative

d MUSIC

4 Boxing Tennis Rowing Handball Oil paintings Pen-and-ink drawings Aquarelles Graphic arts

I .

Mozart stereo Sonatas Disks

Fig. 1. Systematic judgment.

arrangement

1 1 1

of memory

Boxing: Tennis: Rowing: Handball: Oil paint: positive Pen draw: negative Aquarelles: negative Graph. arts:positive Mozart: Stereo: Sonatas: Disks:

operations

I

negative negative negative negative

underlying

four

measures

of recall

and

be remembered unless the topic sports is remembered; and a low degree of (specific) interest in Mozart cannot be remembered unless the topic Mozart comes to mind. In other words, memory of contents (i.e., interest topics) is a logical precondition for memory of degree (i.e., the amount of interest in those topics). This is indicated by the arrows from left to right. The different aspects of recall that are distinguished by the four blocks correspond, on the operational level, to the different dependent measures of the present experiment. The free-recall test provides a convenient measure of memory for contents, that is, for the relevant interest topics. In fact, two computationally independent measures of free recall are used, as conceived by Cohen (1966). Free recullCat is

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defined as the number of accessible categories, where ‘accessible’ means that a category is mentioned by at least one item in the free recall protocol. By contrast, free ~ecalZ,rec is defined as the mean number of specific items recalled (i.e., reconstructed) within categories, counting only accessible categories. Hence, these two independent measures reflect the recall performance at the categorical and specific level, respectively. Memory for degree, on the other hand, is assessed by the remaining two measures: The ratings reflect the recall of the degree of interest associated with the abstract categories, while the cued-recall test asks for the degree of interest associated with the specific topics. In both tasks, the entries of the left-hand boxes are presented as cues: The category labels serve as cues for the rating task and the specific interest topics provide the cues for the cued-recall test. Indeed, the rating task can be viewed as a cued-recall test at the categorical level. Having clarified the nature of the dependent measures, various operational predictions can now be formulated to be tested in the experimental below: (Pl) If the two measures of free recall performance reflect functionally independent stages, their intercorrelation should be much lower than usual for parallel tests. The remaining correlation would only reflect general motivational and intellectual differences between participants. (P2) According to the same reasoning, cued-recall performance, which is assessed at the specific level, should be clearly related to free recall spec, which also involves the specific level (see fig. l), but may be unrelated to free recall,,,, which reflects memory access at the categorical level. (P3) Any relation between ratings and free recall should be confined to the categorical level. Since the rating production process can directly rely on the categorical code, only free recall.., but not free recall,,,, should be a relevant predictor of the ratings, according to the economy assumption. (P4) The number of ‘interest’ and ‘non-interest’ responses given in the cued-recall test for a certain category should closely correspond to the degree-of-interest rating for that same catecory because the cued-recall

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responses (about the degree of interest in specific topics) have to be reconstructed from abstract knowledge about the degree of interest associated with the category code. (It should be noted that this prediction does not contradict Pl, P3, and the functional independence assumption. Even though the two different subprocesses of recall should be independent - as reflected, for instance, in the prediction (Pl) that two performance measures do not correlate ACROSSjudges the products of the first subprocess nevertheless provide the input for the second subprocess. Thus, within judges, there ought to be much correspondence between abstract category ratings and specific cued-recall responses. The same reasoning holds, by the way, for the relation between the free recall,,, and free recall,,,,: Although the two measures may in principle be uncorrelated (according to Pl) UCYOSSjudges, they are necessarily correlated within judges, for specific items can only be recalled within those categories that are accessible.) The predictions Pl to P4 all refer to the interrelations between the different dependent variables. Let us now turn to the predictions about the effects of the independent variables that were manipulated in the experiment to be reported. In short, there are three independent variables the details of which are described below. The first factor refers to the degree-of-interest manipulation (positive vs inconsistent vs negative categories), as already outlined, and is a within-subjects factor. Second, the task order of the dependent measures was varied as a between-subjects factor with the rating task either following or preceding the free-recall task. The task order was either free recall-rating-cued recall (recall-first condition) or rating-free recall-cued recall (rating-first condition). The third factor was only included to control for primacy and recency effects and is of no theoretical interest. Now consider the predictions concerning the impact of these manipulations. (P5) In the rating first condition, the free-recall performance should improve relative to the recall-first condition, due to the priming effect of the preceding rating task. However, since only the category labels are primed by the ratings, this improvement should be confined to free recall at the categorical level. Thus, the two measures of free recall should respond differently to the same factor - a further demonstration of functional independence.

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(P6) Granting the reconstructive nature of recall at the specific level, cued-recall performance should decrease markedly for inconsistent as compared to positive or negative categories. It is more difficult to reconstruct the heterogeneous patterns of inconsistent categories than to reconstruct homogeneously positive or negative patterns. (P7) According to the categorization assumption, the opportunity to categorize the stimuli serves to strengthen the memory code. Thus, with regard to the present experiment, recall should be facilitated in general because all 48 stimuli can be categorized in one of 12 categories. Interestingly, however, some stimuli should have a recall advantage because they belong to more than one category. Apart from the 12 semantic categories, perhaps the most potent category is created by the experimental task - i.e., to form an impression of the target person. Thus, a natural way of encoding is to categorize stimuli with respect to the target person category. This category is defined by the inclusion of positive stimuli (i.e., his interests) and by the exclusion of negative stimuli (i.e., his non-interests). That is, only the positive instances should gain from this extra categorization and should become interconnected by their common association with the target category. A positivity effect on free recall is therefore expected due to the fact that only positive items can be categorized in the target category.

Method Participants

Forty-eight students of psychology (male and female) participated in fulfilling requirement. The experiment was introduced to them as an investigation cognitive performance which characterizes a diagnostician’s job.

a study of the

Materials

The set of 12 interest categories comprising 48 different items had been selected in preliminary studies. Three additional categories had been discarded because of their non-comparability in the number of items recalled per category. No other attempt was made to equalize the difficulty of the interest categories (e.g., word frequency, familiarity, etc.), for the combinations of categories with degrees of interest were varied systematically across judges. As already mentioned, there were always four positive categories (including four interests), four inconsistent (including two interests and two

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non-interests), and four negative categories (including four non-interests) in a series. Each category appeared equally often in each of these conditions. With regard to stimulus order, the differences between the serial positions of items from the same category were maximized. This was accomplished by a fourfold random drawing (without replacement) of items from the 12 categories in a constant order. In order to avoid confounding of primacy or recency positions with specific categories, two different category orderings were used by interchanging the first and second half of the following set of 12 categories: music, electrical engineering, religion, financial business, motoring, political commitment, paintings, sports, culinary things, writers, movies, and animals. Hence, while the order of specific items drawn was random, the order of categories from which they were drawn was fixed for each judge. Design

The three dependent variables (ratings, free recall, cued recall), and their interrelations, were to be analyzed as a function of three independent factors in a 3 (degree of interest) x 2 (task ordering) X 2 (stimulus ordering) factorial design. The first factor, degree of interest, was manipulated within judges by assigning categories to the positive, inconsistent or negative condition. The task ordering factor, manipulated between judges, refers to whether the rating task either preceded or followed the free recall task. (Each participant in the rating-first condition had his/her ‘yoked control in the recall-first condition who saw exactly the same stimulus series.) And the stimulus ordering factor, also manipulated between judges, refers to the order of drawing from categories and is essentially a control factor to control for recency and primacy effects. Procedure

Participants appeared individually and were assigned to the four experimental groups by turns. They were seated about three meters away from the white wall on which the stimuli were presented by a slide-projector; the pictures were about 50 X 75 cm in size. Each slide displayed an interest term, written in bright capital letters on dark ground. A circle on the right of the interest term was either crossed or left open, indicating an interest or non-interest, respectively, of the target person. Thus the display resembled the familiar format of questionnaires. The slides were transported automically at a rate of one per three seconds. Tape-recorded instructions requested judges to form as clear an impression as possible of the unknown person. However, the recall tests were never mentioned so that judges should not interpret the situation as a memory task. Immediately after viewing the stimulus material, the dependend measures were administered in the appropriate order, without pauses. The ratings had to be expressed on five-point scales labeled ‘Interest lacking’, ‘weak’, ‘medium’, ‘strong’, and ‘very strong’. In the free recall test, participants were given four minutes to write down as many interest topics as possible, in any order, irrespective of whether an item was an interest or a non-interest. The cued-recall test consisted of an answer sheet on which all the 48 interest topics were presented again, in categorical order. Participants had to indicate whether the target person had been interested or not in an item. There was also an option to answer ‘don’t know’.

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suits and discussion ‘ations

between

general, the empirical interrelations of the dependent measures are in accordance h the categorical coding model, in particular, with the assumption of two functionJ independent recall stages. Let us first consider the correlations between global asures of recall performance. Of the tasks depicted in fig. 1, it is possible to compute jerformance score for free recall,,, (i.e., the number of categories recalled by at least : item), free recall,nec (i.e., the mean number of items recalled per accessible egory), and cued recall (i.e., the number of correct responses). It does not make ch sense, however, to measure the performance in the rating which is therefore ored for a moment. As expected, performance on the cued recall test, which involves the specific level ;. l), is only substantially related to performance at the specific level of free recall = 0.39, p < 0.01) but not with free recall at the categorical level (r = 0.13, n.s.) [l]. .hough the difference between these two correlations falls short of significance, it is rsistent with the assumption (cf. prediction P2) of two functionally independent ges of recall, access to the categorical code and reconstructing the specific contents .hin categories (cf. Tulving and Pearlstone 1966; Eich et al. 1975). This independence also reflected in the remarkably low correlation between the categorical and specific asure of free recall performance (r = 0.29, p < 0.05). Note that this correlation is :n inflated because both free recall measures are based on the same individual’s ponses to the same test (cf. prediction Pl). Turning to the ratings, we have to consider judgmental tendencies rather than -formance, that is, tendencies to judge the degree of interest higher or lower in ferent categories. Would these tendencies be related to the other recall measures? In fact, the correspondence between ratings and cued-recall responses is remarkable P4). Subtle deviations in the cued-recall responses regularly covary with subtle tiations in the ratings. This finding rests on the following ananlysis: Within each lividual judge, the degree of interest ratings for the 1,2 categories were correlated with ued-recall score of the degree of interest. This score is simply defined as S, = c, r,k, ere S, is the recalled degree of interest in the k-th category and rki = 1 if the ponse to item i is positive (‘interest’) while rk, = -1 if the response to item i is ;ative (‘non-interest’). Thus, the cued-recall score reflects the number of ‘interest’ ponses minus the number of ‘non-interest’ responses on the cued-recall test. Of course, the variance of these scores as well as of the ratings is mostly due to the ference between positive, inconsistent, and negative categories (see the ANOVA ults below). Therefore, this major part of common variance was partialled out. The idual correlations between ratings and cued-recall scores are still substantial. The :dian (intra-judge) correlation amounts to r = 0.46, with an interquartile range from : +0.13 to r = +0.63 indicating the stability of this figure across the 48 individual lges. Apparently, the residual deviations in the ratings and in the cued-recall test The split-half coefficients or reliability for free recall,,,, free recall,pec and cued recall amount 3.68, 0.79, and 0.61, respectively.

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Table 1 Correspondence between ratings and recall scores as a function of the weighting of available information. Weighting parameter Median correlation of ratings and recall scores

1.0

1.2

1.4

1.7

2.0

2.5

3.0

4.0

7.0

0.46

0.43

0.40

0.46

0.44

0.44

0.43

0.38

0.33

reflect the same biases - a finding consistent with the notion that cued-recall responses have to be reconstructed from the same categorical code as the ratings. Can the predictability of the ratings be improved by considering which information was available in free recall? This is an interesting question because much recent theorizing in cognitive psychology is based on the so-called availability principle (Tversky and Kahneman 1973; Ross and Sicoly 1979; Nisbett and Ross 1980) which states that judgments reflect those pieces of information which come to the judge’s mind most easily. For an empirical test, a weighted recall score was constructed according to the following rule: S.$ = c w . r,, , where rki is defined as before and w = 1 if item i was not available in free recall and w = a (with a > 1) if item i was available. Apparently, the new recall score has only been modified in that available items receive an extra weight in determining the recalled degree of interest. per category. The weighting factor a was varied from 1.0 to 7.0. However, the predictability of the ratings from the recall scores did not improve with any value of a (table 1). If anything, the median correlation dropped slightly from the former value of r = 0.46 (with a = 1) to r = 0.33 (with a = 7). Hence, the ratings of the degree of interest seem to be independent of how many items are available within categories, which is no surprise (cf. P3). According to the categorical coding model, free recall of specific items should be irrelevant for predicting the ratings at the categorical level; only the categorical measure of free recall should be a relevant predictor if the two recall stages are independent. Therefore, the ratings were analyzed as a function of whether a category was accessible in the free recall test or not, irrespective of how many items of the category were recalled. Separately, for positive, inconsistent and negative categories, the 48 judges’ mean ratings were compared to their corresponding means that result from averaging over accessible categories only. The results are shown in fig. 2. As expected, the ratings of accessible categories were accentuated. Given accessibility, the rated degree of interest increases for positive categories (z = 2.09, p < 0.05, according to Wilcoxon test), and for inconsistent categories (z = 2.39, p < 0.05); it remained, however, unchanged for negative categories (z = 0.63, n.s.). Thus, the effect occurred only with non-negative categories, and it should be generally noted in this connection that judgmental deviations were mostly confined to the positive end of the rating scales. The standard deviation of the judges’ 12 ratings, as an index of judgmental polarization, is mostly determined by the extremeness of positive-category ratings (r = 0.63) as compared to r = 0.24 for negative category ratings.

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Fig. 2. Mean interest ratings for negative (open arrows), inconsistent (striped), and positive (filled) categories. Downward arrows point to the overall means, upward arrows refer to the corresponding means for accessible categories only. Similar analyses picking out those categories of which 2, 3, or 4 items were recallable did not yield any significant effect. (This replicates the earlier finding that ratings do not depend on how many items can be recalled within categories.) Hence, access to the first instance of a category seems to be the critical event for which the ratings are sensitive. The same categories that are accessible in free recall are accentuated in the ratings, suggesting the categorical code as a common cause. In line with the economy assumption, however, the ratings do not reflect the amount of within-category recall, that is, they are independent of the number of items recalled per category. These findings concerning the predictability of judgmental tendencies may be conveniently recoded in terms of correlations and related to fig. 1. The tendency noted above to give more extreme ratings to positive categories is correlated across judges with the number of positive categories recalled (r = 0.48) but not with the mean number of items recalled within positive categories (r = - 0.12). This can be accounted for by the economy assumption according to which ratings at the categorical level do not have to rely on recall functions at the specific level because all the relevant information is represented at the categorical level. Moreover, the correlation between free recall of positive categories and free recall of many items per positive categories is even slightly negative (r = -0.25) which again supports the functional independence assumption, Impact

of independent

variables

Separate analyses of variance (degree of interest X task order x stimulus order) were conducted for the three dependent measures, with repeated measures on the first factor. It should be remembered that the third factor is only included to control for primacy and recency effects and did not influence the results; it will therefore be ignored. All results are summarized in table 2.

130 Table 2 Summary

K. Fiedler

of the ANOVA

Dependent measure

results:

Means

means

memory

and person judgments

and test statistics.

per condition

a

Significant

test statistics

Inconsistent

Positive

5.1 5.5 4.8 0.7

11.6 11.8 11.4 0.4

16.8 16.2 17.4 -1.2

13.9 14.2 13.7

11.6 11.7 11.5

13.6 13.4 13.9

F,(2,

88) = 16.93,

Free recalloverall Recall first Ratings first

3.4 3.0 3.8

6.5 6.2 6.9

1.9 1.8 8.0

F,(2,

88) = = 41.47,

Free recall,,,

1.4

3.3

3.4

Free recall,pec

1.80

1.98

2.28

F,(2,88) t(pos-inc) t(pos-neg) t(inc-neg)

Ratingsoverall Recall first Ratings first Difference Cued recall overall Recall first Ratings first

Negative

/ Person

a All means are computed after summing positive condition. b The subscripts A, B, C refer to the degree the control factor (C).

over

F,(2,

FAB(2,

all categories

of interest

88) = 508.6,

factor

p i 0.001

88) = 3.90, p < 0.05

in the (A),

b

p i 0.001

= 28.10, = 3.10, = 4.71, = 1.94, negative,

the task ordering

p < 0.001

p < 0.001 p < 0.02 p < 0.001 p < 0.10 inconsistent, factor

or

(B), and

With regard to the cued-recall measure, there is only a significant main effect for the degree of interest factor, F(2, 88) = 16.93, p < 0.001. The cued-recall performance is markedly reduced for inconsistent categories (X = 11.6 hits), as compared with generally good performance for positive (X = 13.6) and negative categories (X = 13.9). Such an inconsistency effect (cf. P6) is cogent evidence for the categorical nature of the memory code, because inconsistency is a property of the categories rather than of the single items. Of course, the homogeneous pattern of positive and negative categories is easier to reconstruct than the less redundant pattern of inconsistent categories. It should be noted that most participants correctly tended to give about two ‘interest’ and two ‘non-interest’ responses for inconsistent categories, but often to the wrong items - hence, their reduced hit rates in cued recall despite their sensitivity for the amount of interest per category. This clearly reflects the reconstructive nature of the second stage recall process. In the ANOVA of the free recall data, there is also a significant main effect for the degree of interest factor, F(2, 88) = 41.47, p < 0.001, reflecting the predicted recall advantage of positive information (cf. P7). As shown in table 2, the average participant’s total number of items recalled from positive, inconsistent, and negative categories amounts to 7.9, 6.5, and 3.4 items, respectively. Further analyses revealed that this positivity effect is visible at both the categorical and the specific level (cf. table 2). On

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the one hand, more positive (X = 3.42) and inconsistent (X = 3.27) categories are recalled than negative (Z = 1.37) categories, suggesting that the presence of at least some positive instances (with inconsistent categories) makes the categorical code more accessible. The corresponding F statistic amounts to F(2, 88) = 28.10, p i 0.001. On the other hand, within-category recall is a direct function of the number of positive items (cf. the statistics in table 2), that is, positive > inconsistent > negative categories. (This latter analysis rests on t tests using averages per category rather than the usual ANOVA on the per-S data, since too many Ss failed to recall any negative instance.) The strength of this positivity effect is noteworthy if one recognizes that the same verbal material had to be recalled in the positive, inconsistent, and negative condition. (Across participants, all 12 categories occurred equally often in all three conditions.) Moreover, the experimental instruction - to attend to the degree of interest - rendered positive and negative information equally relevant. Hence, the differential recall performance must somehow reflect the fact that positive items were classified as belonging to the target category (i.e., as characterizing the target person) while negative items were not. Such an extra categorization entails deeper processing of positive items from which an integrative picture of the target’s personality must be built. There is no similar category for categorizing the negative items because it would be quite an unnatural strategy to form an impression of the ‘anti-person’, that is, of how the target person is not. In any case, the positivity effect on free recall fits well into the categorical coding framework. It seems noteworthy to mention several comparable positivity phenomena, for instance, in psycholinguistics (Clark 1969), concept identification (Hovland and Weiss 1953), discrimination learning (Newman et al. 1980) and contingency detection (Jenkins and Ward 1965) that all appear to reflect the generality of the phenomenon. On the other hand, there is reason to question the generality of the present positivity effect in free recall which might be specific to an experimental task in which the instructions emphasize impression formation and conceal the recall task. In fact, this is what we found in a recent study (Fiedler et al. 1986). It is also of interest that Hamilton et al. (1980) and Sherman et al. (1983) found more higher-order coding with impression formation instructions than with memory instructions. However, categorical coding can also be shown to occur in pure memory tasks (cf. Cohen 1966). In any case, it would be desirable to further investigate the generality of the present findings for different task conditions (e.g., when the monotonous flow of stimulus information is replaced by a more realistic observation task). The only other reliable effect in the analysis of the free recall data is due to the task ordering factor. Not surprisingly, free recall was facilitated in the rating-first condition presumably because the labels attached to the rating scales primed the access to the categorical code. In fine agreement with the other .results and with the theoretical expectations, however, the advantage of the rating-first condition is only visible at the categorical level, F(1, 44) = 5.77, p < 0.05 [2], but not at the specific level of free recall, [2] It should be noted that this effect is only apparent this single analysis, then, the control factor for stimulus 5.77, p < 0.05.

with one of the two stimulus orderings. ordering also had some impact, F(1,44)

In =

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F(1, 44) = 0.92, ns. (cf. P5) [3]. Of course, priming the categorical code should not influence the reconstruction of within-category contents, if the two stages of recall are funtionally independent (cf. Eich et al. 1975). Finally, two reliable findings emerged from the analysis of the rating data. Apart from the trivial main effect of the degree of interest factor, F(2, 88) = 508.6, p < 0.001, a degree of interest x task ordering interaction was found, F(2, 88) = 3.90, p < 0.05. This interaction is due to the fact that the ratings were less extreme (i.e., less polarized) in the recall-first condition. In the absence of any cogent explanation, this may be tacitly interpreted with reference to the finding reported above that only accessible categories received extreme ratings. The prior experience of participants in the recall-first condition that certain categories are not accessible may have prevented them (more than participants in the rating-first condition) from utilizing the complete range of the rating scales.

Concluding

remarks

The categorical coding model offers a suitable framework for integrating many empirical results. Several findings based on correlational as well as experimental analyses have been reported here that converge to the following picture: Social information is encoded at the level of abstract categories; the specific category contents is only reconstructed if necessary; accessing the categorical code and reconstructing the specifics within categories are two independent processes; and categorization facilitates the learning of the information. Some other findings could have been presented in support of the categorical coding framework, for example, the obvious clustering in free recall (cf. Bousfield 1953), or the fact that once a category is opened more than one item is likely to be recalled within that category (Cohen 1966). These findings only replicate well-known phenomena and are therefore not reported at length. However, one subsidiary piece of evidence deserves to be added here because it neatly illustrates the adaptive flexibility of ‘mnemonic strategies. Based on the majority judgment of 5 colleagues, the categories were divided into 6 more coherent and 6 less coherent categories [4]. ‘Coherent’ means that interest in one item implies interest in the other items of a category too. [3] Due to the already mentioned failure of several subjects to recall any negative items, the degree of interest factor was not included in this latter ANOVA, that is, the data for positive, inconsistent, and negative categories were pooled. [4] The more coherent categories are: financial business, electrical engineering, political commitment, paintings, culinary things, and movies. The less coherent ones are: music, religion, motoring, animals, writers, and sports.

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(For example, different kinds of sports constitute a less coherent category than different kinds of paintings.) An analysis of variance (degree of interest X coherence) revealed that, within coherent categories, a smaller number of specific items was recallable (X = 2.74) than within less coherent categories (X = 3.89), F(1, 47) = 10.43, p < 0.005. This suggests a mnemonic strategy which reduces the amount of information stored if the coherent structure of categories (i.e., implicational knowledge) renders the recall of details unnecessary. It should be noted, however, that coherence is confounded with the semantic meaning of the two subsets of categories. Thus, this subsidiary finding must be interpreted with caution. Theoretically, the categorical coding model was introduced here as an alternative to the usual dyadic approach to person memory and person judgments. Rather than explaining judgments as dependent on recall or vice versa - which runs the risk of being a circular approach recall-test measures and judgmental measures are regarded as alternative modes of expressing social knowledge. While these measures are all considered dependent variables, the role of the independent variables should be occupied by those factors which influence the abstraction of a memory code, its accessibility, and the reconstruction process. Hence, a broader framework of memory processes characterizes this alternative approach, the advantage of which seems to be recognized now by several researchers working in the realm of person memory (Srull 1983; Pryor et al. 1983). One of the results which has an interesting bearing on the common availability principle is worthwhile to be accentuated theoretically. Person judgments were independent of the availability of the specific raw information and only dependend on the availability of the inferred categories. This finding, granted its replicability, raises doubts about the general applicability of the availability principle. At the same time, the finding suggests a possible explanation for the inconsistency between such studies demonstrating that judgment tendencies covary with recall tendencies (Fox 1980; Reyes et al. 1980) and other studies in which judgments are unrelated to selective. recall (Hastie and Kumar 1979; Riskey 1979). The availability effects in the former cases may simply reflect the use of higher-order coding strategies. Regardless of the truth of this speculation, however, the differential impact of the availibility of specific stimuli and self-generated higher-order units deserves to be further investigated.

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