Learning mechanisms underlying impression formation and updating

Impression formation is the process of learning about people—how we infer a person’s character traits, goals, and preferences while forming our own attitudes toward them. Emerging research shows that impressions are formed through a variety of mechanisms—a multimodal process rooted in different underlying systems of learning and memory. In this review, I describe the roles of episodic, semantic, instrumental, and Pavlovian memory systems in impression formation and updating. By considering the unique and interactive functions of learning and memory mechanisms, this memory systems framework expands and clarifies our understanding of how impressions are formed, changed, and expressed in behavior, relative to prior accounts based only on semantic memory models, while illuminating longstanding debates on the nature of implicit social cognition and how social information is represented in the mind.