ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the manner in which people cognitively organize social information. It refers to the temporal flow of information about other people, with special emphasis on situations in which people receive two or more units of information about each of two or more persons. The chapter argues that new considerations arise when the stimulus field contains information items about a variety of persons. It explores the possibility that there are a variety of factors that determine the strength of the “person gestalt.” The chapter describes the implications of the present approach for other problems in social and personality psychology. The manner in which an observer organizes information about persons in memory will affect the way in which the information items are later recalled. In an initial pilot investigation, the possibility of persons serving as organizing foci in memory was explored using the free recall paradigm.
