Much research in the area of person perception has dealt with the problem of how people organize information about other people, including how familiarity mediates the cognitive organization of person information. One multi-operational investigation found that information sets about familiar people, as opposed to unfamiliar people, resulted in the increased availability of persons as units of cognitive organization in a speeded categorization task and in the ordinal clustering of information according to persons in free recall. However, the two components of person familiarity of the descriptive information were deliberately confounded in the experiment. The effects of the separate contributions of familiarity of names and the familiarity or consistency of descriptors were investigated using the same information sets and tasks from previous research, but with the addition of two extra conditions, i.e., familiar person names associated with unfamiliar information sets and unfamiliar names associated with familiar information sets. The data showed that both components of familiarity: (1) affected the cognitive organization of person information; (2) contributed independently when retrieving stored information (free recall task); and (3) interacted when accessing person schema (sorting task). (Author)