ABSTRACT

Getting to know others socially often involves inferences about characteristics and traits of individuals. This is crucial to social reasoning, as it allows one to go beyond the specific behavior of the individual and to generalize to similar events in the future and to similar people. How do we make trait inferences from observing an individual's behavior? How is this information processed and stored in memory? The purpose of this article is to attempt to gain insight into this process by taking a computational modeling perspective-in particular, a connectionist approach-to these questions.