Conscious awareness of self-relevant information is necessary for an incidental self-memory advantage (original) (raw)
Related papers
Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2018
Using the self as a reference point at encoding produces a memory advantage over other types of encoding activities. Even simply co-presenting a target item with self-relevant versus other-relevant information can produce an "incidental" self-memory advantage in the absence of any explicit task demand to evaluate the item's self-relevancy. In the present study, we asked whether an incidental self-memory advantage results from (a) the mere co-presentation of a target item with self-relevant information at encoding or (b) relational processing between a target item and self-relevant information at encoding. During incidental encoding, words were presented in two different colors either above or below a name (the participant's own or another person's). Participants judged either the location of each word in relation to the name ("Is the word above or below the name?") or the color of each word to which the name had no relevance ("Is the word in red ...
Does Implicit Self-Reference Effect Occur by the Instantaneous Own-Name?
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
Self-reference effect (SRE) is defined as better recall or recognition performance when the materials that are memorized refer to the self. The SRE paradigm usually requires participants to explicitly refer items to themselves, but some researchers have found that the SRE also can occur for implicitly self-referenced items. Few studies though have investigated the effect of self-related stimuli without awareness. In this study, we presented self-related (participants’ names) or other (other’s names or nouns) stimuli for a very short time between masks and then explicitly presented subsequent trait adjectives to participants. Recognition performance showed no significant differences between the own-name and the other two conditions in Experiment 1 that had random-order conditions. On the other hand, the result of Experiment 2 that had block-order conditions and greater prime stimuli suggests that SRE can occur as a result of the instantaneous stimulus: Subjects who showed better memo...
Effects of self-referencing on feeling-of-knowing accuracy and recollective experience
Memory, 2014
The current research investigated the impact of self-referencing (SR) on feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgements to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these metamemory judgements and specifically test the relationship between recollective experiences and FOK accuracy within the accessibility framework FOK judgements are thought to be by-products of the retrieval process and are therefore closely related to memory performance. Because relating information to one's self is one of the factors enhancing memory performance, we investigated the effect of self-related encoding on FOK accuracy and recollective experience. We compared performance on this condition to a separate deep processing condition in which participants reported the frequency of occurrence of pairs of words. Participants encoded pairs of words incidentally, and following a delay interval, they attempted at retrieving each target prompted by its cue. Then, they were re-presented with all cues and asked to provide FOK ratings regarding their likelihood of recognising the targets amongst distractors. Finally, they were given a surprise recognition task in which following each response they identified whether the response was remembered, known or just guessed. Our results showed that only SR at encoding resulted in better memory, higher FOK accuracy and increased recollective experience.
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 2011
Knowledge of oneself is preserved in many memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage. Therefore, cognitive strategies that capitalize on mechanisms related to the self may be particularly effective at enhancing memory in this population. The present study investigated the effect of ''self-imagining,'' imagining an event from a personal perspective, on short and long delayed cued recall in memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage. Sixteen patients intentionally encoded word pairs under four separate conditions: visual imagery, semantic elaboration, other person imagining, and self-imagining. The results revealed that self-imagining led to better performance than other-imagining, semantic elaboration, and visual imagery. Furthermore, the ''self-imagination effect'' (SIE) was preserved after a 30-min delay and was independent of memory functioning. These findings indicate that self-imagining provides a mnemonic advantage in brain-injured individuals, even those with relatively poor memory functioning, and suggest that selfimagining may tap into mnemonic mechanisms related to the self.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1989
This research suggests that difficulties in demonstrating consistent effects of the self on recall and in specifying the processes involved in self-referent encoding stem partly from a failure to distinguish between two self-reference encoding tasks: those requiring Ss to decide if a word describes them and those requiring Ss to retrieve a personal memory involving the word. Studies have treated these tasks as equivalent methods for exploring the memorial properties of self, but the present research shows that this assumed equivalence is in error. The authors show that much of the inconsistency in the self-reference literature is eliminated when studies are segregated on the basis of these two distinct self-reference tasks. The authors conclude that both trait-descriptive and autobiographical information about the self is available in memory, and that each can be addressed independently. Suppose a friend studying medicine told you that carpal tunnel syndrome is a nerve disorder characterized by weakness, numbness, and tingling in the thumb and first 2 fingers of the hand. You might or might not remember that fact. Suppose, however, that your friend's description of carpal tunnel syndrome reminded you of symptoms you had once experienced. Chances are you would have little difficulty remembering this description in detail. It seems almost self-evident that relating information to the self facilitates memory. Only recently, however, has the mnemonic effectiveness of self-reference been tested empirically. In one of the first demonstrations that information is well remembered when it is considered in relation to the self, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977) used Craik and Tulving's (1975) depth of processing methodology to examine the effects of various encoding strategies on incidental recall. Rogers et al. found that judging trait adjectives for self-descriptiveness ("Describes
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1987
In three experiments the release from proactive interference paradigm was used to examine the role of the self in memory. In Experiment 1 stimuli were trait adjectives that had been previously rated for their descriptiveness of the rater or for their descriptiveness of a well-known other (Ronald Reagan). Across three trials, significant proactive interference was obtained for all adjectives (regardless of whether they described the self, Ronald Reagan, or neither). Release from proactive interference was observed only for self-rated adjectives. The interpretation of this result was clouded, however, because the trait adjectives also shifted on an evaluative dimension from Trials l-3 to Trial 4. In Experiments 2 and 3, when the evaluative dimension was not allowed to change, no release from proactive interference was obtained. These results suggest that the involvement of a self-schema in memory is not as ubiquitous or automatic as some views have assumed. 0 1987 Academic Press. Inc. The self has been conceived in recent theoretical formulations as an articulated memory schema that guides the processing of self-relevant information (e.g.,
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2017
Do different modes of thinking about the self lead to differences in performance on a contextual memory task? We conducted a pre-registered replication of the study of self-construal priming on spatial memory by Kühnen and Oyserman (2002; Study 2), simultaneously evaluating the role oftask-compliance, operationalization specificity, and cross-cultural robustness. In the original study, participants either circled first-person plural (interdependent condition) or singular pronouns (independent condition) when reading a passage and subsequently memorized and recalled a set of objects presented on a visual-spatial grid. When employing a digital version of the original procedure, we were able to replicate the original findings, with better recall of objects in their original location in the interdependent (vs. independent) condition. Notably, the effect of self-construal priming on spatial memory was strongest when screening out participants who did not comply with instructions on the pronoun task and absent when including non-compliant participants. Moreover, in contrast to the original study, effects of priming were not specific to object-&-location operationalization of spatial memory recall, and also present for location-independent object recall and object-independent spatial placement recall. Additionally, condition effects were robust across observed cultural differences: Though white participants performing less successfully compared to non-white participants, both groups were comparably susceptible to priming effects. We discuss the present results and insights learned from the replication process in light of the on-going debate about the replicability of psychological experiments, highlighting the notion of task-compliance, methodological transparency and cross-cultural factors for further advancement of psychological science.
Remembering information related to one's self
Journal of Research in Personality, 1979
How does memory for an incident vary depending on whether, and how, the person relates the information to himself? Trait adjectives are better remembered if they were judged in reference to oneself rather than judged for meaning or sound. Our first experiment found a similar mnemonic advantage of referring a described episode or object to some event from one's life. Pleasant events were remembered better than unpleasant ones. A second experiment found incidental memory for trait adjectives was equally enhanced by judging each directly in reference to one's self-concept or indirectly by retrieving an episode either from one's life or from one's mother's life. Contrariwise, memory was poorer when traits were judged in reference to a less familiar person. Thus, good memory depends on relating the inputs to a well-differentiated memory structure.
“Know thyself!” The role of idiosyncratic self-knowledge in recognition memory
Journal of Memory and Language, 2005
In two experiments, it is demonstrated that knowledge about idiosyncratic aspects of oneÕs own memory performance may become the basis for inferences in recognition. In the first study, beliefs about the effect of the encoding conditions on memory were experimentally induced by varying the memory task such that participantsÔ performance was superior either for high-frequent or for low-frequent words. As a consequence, participants tended to accept test words that belonged to the category that they were led to believe to be less memorable. In the second study, idiosyncratically based beliefs were compared to nomothetically based beliefs and it was shown that idiosyncratic knowledge had a predominant influence. These sets of findings suggest that to understand reconstructive mechanisms in recognition, idiosyncratic knowledge (or beliefs) about oneÕs own memory must be taken into account.
Reference to self, other, and object as levels of processing in recognition memory
Cognitive Science, 2014
Reference to self, other, and object as levels of processing in recognition memory Gustavo Gauer (gustavo.gauer@ufrgs.br) Department of Developmental and Personality Psychology, Rua Ramiro Barcelos, 2600 Porto Alegre, RS 90035-003 Brazil Juliana Avila-Souza (juliana.avilasouza@gmail.com) Department of Developmental and Personality Psychology, Rua Ramiro Barcelos, 2600 Porto Alegre, RS 90035-003 Brazil Guilherme Lannig (guilherme.lannig@gmail.com) Department of Developmental and Personality Psychology, Rua Ramiro Barcelos, 2600 Porto Alegre, RS 90035-003 Brazil Abstract Information related to the self tends to be better remembered than other information. Mentalization (i.e., attributing mind to an external entity) is one potential intervening factor in contrasting myself, others “like me”, and inanimate objects. Twenty-seven undergraduates (mean age 23.6 years, 16 women) responded to a Remember/Know (R/K) recognition task. In the study phase, 78 words were presented at 3 levels of pr...