Person memory: Organization of behaviors by traits

Subjects studied a list of sentences describing a fictional person in terms of the "Big Five" personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, agreeable ness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience). Although recall impro ved across trials in both memorization and impression formation instruction s, clustering of the sentences by Big Five categories remained at very low levels throughout the experiment. Nor did blocking the sentences by Big Fiv e category improve recall. Although the Big Five structure has been suggest ed as a universally applicable framework for personality structure, it does not appear to play a salient role in organizing person memory. (C) 1999 Ac ademic Press.