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A neglected topic in social perception deals with how people organize the flow of information about the many individuals in their social environment. This flow of social information typically involves several items of information about each of several persons. The items about different persons are often arbitrarily intermixed in their temporal order of appearance. This paper questions the assumption that social information is automatically organized on a person-by-person basis, that the information items about each person are cognitively grouped into one person category that is separate from the other person categories. The notion that familiarity mediates this cognitive organization of person information was examined using a converging operations approach. Three distinct methodologies were used to study the relationship between familiarity and person organization: (1) a speeded sorting task; (2) a recognition reaction time task; and (3) a free recall task. Each of the three experiments demonstrated that this tendency to organize social information on a person-by-person basis was greater for familiar than for unfamiliar persons. Two of the three tasks provided evidence that social information is not organized by person when the stimulus persons are completely unfamiliar. (Author)
Pryor et al. (Thu,) studied this question.