SP Speaker: Lisa Huang

Title: Attention Theory: Trait Learning in Context Abstract: Not surprisingly, people behave differently depending on the context they are in. For instance, the way a person behaves in a classroom setting may differ from the way that same person behaves at a party. In this talk, I will discuss how perceivers form context-based trait impressions of other people and why some of these impressions are stronger than others. This research draws from principles of Attention Theory in order to account for the processes underlying trait learning in context. Across a series of studies, we show that rarely-occurring contexts lead to stronger impressions than frequently-occurring encounters, and that the learning order of frequent and rare contexts accounts for this difference in impression strength. I will also present new data that explores implicit representations of trait-context associations. Implications and future directions will be discussed.