An Investigation of Three Models of Multitrait Representations

Two experiments were conducted to test three models of person memory concerning multitrait expectancies: the trait-specific, complete association, and dual-coding models. Participants in Experiment 1 were led to expect a target person to display two traits, then they were presented with congruent and incongruent behaviors ostensibly performed by the target person, and finally they were asked to recall the behaviors. In contradiction to the complete association model, which predicts that participants form congruent-congruent associations as often as congruent-incongruent associations, incongruent items were better recalled than were congruent items. Furthermore, conditional probability analyses contradicted the implications of the trait-specific and dual-coding models. Findings from Experiment 2 reinforced the lack of support for all three models.