Julia Kneer

Reading About Persons: The Effects of Conjunctions on the Mental Representation of Person Descriptions

Three experiments investigated the processing of person descriptions that consisted of a number of statements about the characteristics of a person. In one condition, each statement referred to a single person attribute and in the other condition, causal and additive conjunctions to verbally link the statements were introduced. Evidence was found that the introduction of verbal links enhanced participants’ memory about the characteristics of the described person. On-line measures of processing showed that the comprehension of person information was strongly facilitated by the introduction of verbal links. Furthermore, the results were due to the introduction of causal connections between person attributes. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for models of person memory and representation.