DEVELOPMENT AND REPRESENTATION OF PERSONALITY IMPRESSIONS

A developmental model of impression formation was tested. Results indi cated that the mental representation of personality impressions depend s on the perceiver's degree of experience with the impression target. At low levels of experience, impressions consist primarily of stored b ehavioral exemplars. However, as experience increases, an abstract imp ression is formed that is subsequently stored and retrieved independen tly of the behaviors on which it was based. Experiment 2 demonstrated that impressions continue to evolve once they have become abstract and that behavioral exemplars affect judgments even when they are not dir ectly retrieved for judgment purposes. These findings highlight the im portance of applying dynamic approaches to impression-formation resear ch.