Spontaneous Trait Inference Reconsidered Can Implied Trait Cues Facilitate Pattern Completion In Episodic Memory?

Interaction with others plays a significant role in our daily life as we interpret the meaning of one’s behavior with little effort. Spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are trait inferences that appear unintentionally, almost effortlessly and usually without awareness. They appear with attention to trait-implying behavior for almost any purpose (Uleman & Moskowitz,1994). There are two specific versions to explain what STI is about and these two versions corroborate the divergences of STI.The first version is to look at which links STI has with memory (especially with the actor) and the second version is to explain what STI refers to causality. Past experiments (Winter & Uleman,1984; Uleman, Winborne, Winter & Shechter,1986; Claeys,1990) have discovered that direct trait retrieval cues are the best cues to retrieve the corresponding short implied trait sentences. The ability of spontaneously trait inference when perceiving one another behavior has been proved from the past experiments. Also, the perceiving behavior of one another is able to be retrieved by the traits from STI.However, it is still unsure that can the inference traits from STI function as retrieval cues to facilitate the retrieval of a personal related episodic event? When perceiving the behavior from other, does the inference trait from STI connect with the personal episodic event which corresponds with the trait? There is no current research showing that connection between STI and personal episodic event in memory. The presented study has provided the pioneering prospective to reveal the connection between STI and episodic memory. In the first experiment, three different types of passages (direct trait sentences, implied trait sentences or without any trait sentences) are randomly distributed to participants, then, they are required to answer question of recalling an experience that happens to him or someone he knows, respectively. The result has failed to show the connection between STI with personal episodic event in memory due to the underestimation of spontaneity and vulnerability of the connection.The second experiment has made improvement to the designs of experiment. Three different types of passages (direct trait sentences, implied trait sentences or without any trait sentences) are randomly distributed to participants, then, they are required to retrieve the episodic event in passages according to three different condition of retrieval cues (direct trait cues, short implied trait sentences cues and cues of objects, person, or locations). The results show that, the inference traits from STI are able to retrieve the corresponding episodic events in memories, as the short implied trait sentences are able to act as retrieval cues to retrieve the corresponding episodic events in passage. The connections between the traits from STI and episodic memories have been demonstrated in the second experiment.Besides that, the results also show that, the retrieval cues of short implied traits sentences are able to retrieve the accuracy and completeness of corresponding episodic events. This means that, during the encoding process, traits are encoded along with the multiple elements as coherence in episodic event, and are able to be retrieved from the corresponding traits from implied trait sentences. Specifically, the traits from STI are able to retrieve the corresponding origin ensemble elements in memory.Correspondingly, the results show that one of the episodic elements of locations, persons, objects in episodic events are able to retrieve the corresponding traits which are encoded as coherence in episodic memories This is a pioneering result to show that the "trait" from STI is also encoded as one of the multiple elements as coherence in episodic events and be able to retrieve through one of the corresponding multiple elements, as the dependency of multiple elements in episodic memory.