Blackwell Reference Online

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Mechanisms by which people store and retrieve the knowledge they have encoded. The study of person memory by social psychologists addresses questions such as how social memory is stored in the mind, what codes are used for memories about people, whether traits or people are basic units of memory, and how memory influences people's judgments about others. Memory research in social cognition draws heavily on the progress made by cognitive psychologists, but unique insights also derive from the social context ( see Fiske & Taylor, 1991 , for a review). The most common and well-developed model of memory is the associative network model. In this model, memory for an event or a person consists of concepts and connections between concepts. As the number of connections between a concept and other concepts increases, retrieval of that concept is easier, because there are many alternative routes to locate it in memory. In the associative network model, concepts can be stored under a variety of memory codes (to be discussed later), but one common code is called a proposition. Propositions are made up of ideas, called nodes, and links between nodes. “Lucy attended the concert” is one example of a proposition, where the nouns and verbs (e.g., Lucy, attended) are nodes, and relations between them are links (e.g., “Lucy” is linked to “attended”). Under this model, ideas in a proposition ... log in or subscribe to read full text