The traditional approaches in person perception have generally failed in dealing with the type of information concerning the behavior of the target person in various situations, the commonest type of information exchanged in daily interpersonal Interactions. To ameliorate this state of the art, we conducted the following experiment: The task given to the Ss was to select the correct alternative action among the specified alternatives which the target person had chosen in three of the test situations (the Ss would obtain bonus for each correct prediction). Before doing this, the Ss were allowed to purchase hint information concerning the actions the target person had taken in each of the twenty different situations, as many hints as they like to have at a certain cost per each hint. Significant differences were obtained between two groups of Ss: university students and much older adults (mostly housewives). The most important findings in this study were obtained through the structural analyses of the processes of the Ss' information processing shown in their protocol data.
