Brewer, D. D. (1995). Patterns in the recall of persons in a department of a formal organization. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 5, 255-284.

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This paper describes the cognitive structures people use to organize persons in memory.  Employees of a department in the public affairs division of a university free listed the names of coworkers.  Perceived work proximity was the primary and general associative factor in subjects' recalls of fellow employees.  That is, persons who were recalled successively were perceived to work more closely with one another than
would be expected by chance.  The temporal features of subjects' recalls also reflected the influence of perceived work proximity as an associative factor.  In addition, perceived work proximity impacted associative patterning in the recalls of a subset of subjects who were instructed, at retest, to recall persons in alphabetical order of persons' first names. Serial order response patterns (which persons tended to be recalled earlier or later in recall) were related to persons' status and perceived work proximity to the subject.  These results, along with two recent studies (Brewer 1993; Brewer and Yang 1994), strongly suggest that members of a community share a common cognitive structure of community members that is based on the community's social structure.

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