ABSTRACT
Major findings in impression formation are reviewed and modeled from a connectionist perspective. The findings are in the areas of primacy and recency in impression formation, asymmetric diagnosticity of ability-and morality-related traits, increased recall for trait-inconsistent information, assimilation and contrust in priming, and discounting of trait inferences by situational information. The majority of these phenomena are illustrated with well-known experiments and simulated with an autoassociative network architecture with linear activation update using the delta learning algorithm for adjusting the connection weights. All of the simulations successfully reproduced the empirical findings. Moreover, the proposed model is shown to be consistent with earlier algebraic models of impression formation (Anderson, 1981; Busemeyer, 1991; Hogarth & Einhorn, 1992). The discussion centers on how our model compares to other connec-tionist approaches to impression formation and how it may contribute to a more parsimonious and unified theory of person perception.
