Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A unified model of social perception, integrating causal reasoning and impression formation (Miller & Read, 1991), provides an account of h o w people ar- rive at coherent representations of others and explain their behavicM'. T h e model integrates work on a knowledge structure approach (Schank & Abelson, 1977) with Kintsch's (1988) construction-integration model and Thagard's (1989) model of explanatory coherence. W e explore two issues in social percep- tion. First, w e show h o w the model can be used to explain trait inferences, where traits are treated as frames, composed of goals, plans, resources and beliefs. Second, w e examine h o w people might com- bine inconsistent traits to arrive at a coherent model of another, an example of conceptual combination.