The effects of self-reference, self-relevance, and self involvement on recall and recognition of personality-trait information.

The role of self-cognition in the processing of personal information

“…Furthermore, it was revealed only in extraverted items that self-referent processing produced significantly higher recall and recognition confidence than semantic processing and structural processing, thus confirming self-reference effects as evidenced in Rogers et al (1977). Those results proved the effects of self-cognition in processing self-relevant information, which can be regarded as comparable to the effects of self-schemas; however, Kato (1987) did not assess in advance whether the subjects possess self-schemas on the extraversion-introversion dimension or not. Thus, he could not establish differential effects of self-cognition and self-schemas.…”

“…Kato (1987) did not found conclusive selfreference effects with the introverted SC group. This finding may be interpreted in this way; introverted personality-trait adjectives likely carry negative valence and that complicated the finding for the introverted SC group in the Kato (1987) study. To avoid this complication, the present study employed extraverted SC subjects only.…”

“…Self-cognition was argued in this paper to be particularly important in efficiently activating appropriate self-schemas to process self-relevant information. In keeping with the Kato (1987)'s procedure, it was explored how the presence or absence of self-cognition on the extraversionintroversion dimension would influence the processing of self-relevant information. The main results were threefold.…”

“…Finally, self-reference effects were also subjected to scrutiny again. As Kato (1987) could not obtain conclusive results on self-reference effects in the introvert self-cognition group, the present study focused only on extraverted subjects.' Since only extraverted items are relevant to self-cognition, self-reference effects would be expected to appear only for the extraverted items.…”

“…why encoding with self enhances memory, they used the concept of self-schemas, even though they did not examine whether subjects possessed self-schemas (e.g., Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). Kato (1987) pointed out a lack of studies on the effect of self-cognition in processing self-relevant information. Using subjects with extraverted or introverted self-cognition (SC) and with recall and recognition as measures, he explored self-reference effects as found by Rogers et al (1977) and self-relevance effects' as demonstrated by Markus (Markus, 1977;.…”