PATTERNS IN THE RECALL OF PERSONS IN A RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

This paper examines the cognitive structures people use to organize persons in memory. Members of a Christian fellowship of Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American young adults free-listed the names of fellowship members. Perceived social proximity was the primary and general associative factor in subjects' recalls of fellowship members. Persons that were recalled successively were perceived to be much closer socially than would be expected by chance. Also, there were shorter pauses between adjacently recalled pairs of persons who were socially close than for those who were socially distant. Frequency (which persons tend to be recalled) and serial order (which persons tend to be mentioned earlier or later in recall) response patterns were influenced by persons' visibility in the fellowship and perceived social proximity to a subject. The results suggest that members of a community share a common cognitive structure of community members that is based on the community's social structure.