Memory for Serial Order in Social Cognition: Does Order Matter When We Are Forming Impressions About Strangers?

The systematic study of memory for serial order has yet to find its niche in social cognition. According to the person memory literature, the organizational process underlying impression formation results in a network of associative links between information nodes (behaviors and traits) representing the target. This representation should facilitate the recall of source information and impair the recall of order information. The present study shows that both order and source information were better recalled under impression formation conditions, suggesting that the representation of a target person tends to preserve the relative position of events in a