The self and recollective experience

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that self-reference at encoding increases the probability of recollective experience in recognition memory. In all three experiments separate groups of subjects studied words naming personality traits. One group judged the self-relevance of the traits, the other groups performed orientating tasks low in self-reference. In a recognition test subjects 6rst identified old items and then indicated which of these were accompanied by recollective experience ('remember' responses) and which were recognized on some other basis ('know' responses). No reliable differences in overall recognition performance between self-referent and semantic encoding tasks were observed. However, subjects who encoded trait adjectives with reference to the self produced reliably more remember responses and few know responses than subjects who had encoded the items in the low self-referent tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated a self-reference effect in recognition accompanied by recollective experience after 1-hour retention interval, while Experiment 2 found this effect to persist over a 24-hour retention interval. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this self-reference effect is obtained under incidental as well as under intentional learning conditions. Taken together these findings demonstrate the importance of self-reference as a factor in determining the likelihood that recognition judgements will be accompanied by recollective experience.The self plays a critical role in the formation, organization, and retrieval of memories (Brown ). But the very intricacy and complexity of the relationship between self and memory has meant that isolating effects of the self upon memory has proved particularly difficult. One effect that has, none the less, received considerable attention is the self-reference effect (SRE), which is observed when the degree of self-reference of to-be-remembered materials is varied. Interest in this area stemmed largely from a study by Rogers et al. (1977) in which a self-reference condition was added to a standard levels-of-processing

Editorial: A Review of Self-Processing Biases in Cognition

“…Theoretical explanations for the SRE have focused on the self-memory system, the extensive body of self-knowledge stored in long-term memory that has the capacity to scaffold incoming information to which it is relevant (Conway & Dewhurst, 1995;Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986;Klein & Loftus, 1988;Symons & Johnson, 1997). The self-memory system comprises a bi-directional partnership between the working self and the autobiographical knowledge base (Conway, 2005;Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).…”

“…However, in an interesting analysis Allan et al also measured source memory (correct identification of the item owner). Source memory is particularly associated with self-referent memory because it utilizes episodic recollection of information about the encoding event (see Conway & Dewhurst, 1995;Conway, Dewhurst, Pearso, & Sapute, 2001). Indeed, Conway and colleagues (Conway & Dewhurst, 1995;Conway et al, 2001) go as far as to suggest that the SRE is re-named the self-reference recollection effect (SRRE) because any self-referential memory should be episodic in nature.…”

“…Source memory is particularly associated with self-referent memory because it utilizes episodic recollection of information about the encoding event (see Conway & Dewhurst, 1995;Conway, Dewhurst, Pearso, & Sapute, 2001). Indeed, Conway and colleagues (Conway & Dewhurst, 1995;Conway et al, 2001) go as far as to suggest that the SRE is re-named the self-reference recollection effect (SRRE) because any self-referential memory should be episodic in nature. Allan et al found that in their experiment, participants' source memory was significantly better if the owner was self, but did not differ between items belonging to the similar and dissimilar other.…”

“…Indeed, stimuli associated with self are among the most evocative of environmental cues and give rise to significant memory advantages (Conway & Dewhurst, 1995;Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977;Symons & Johnson, 1997). While the attentional and memorial effects of self-relevant cues have been discussed in the psychological literature for decades, there has been a recent resurgence of research interest in self-processing biases more widely.…”

Self-relevance and wishful thinking: Facilitation and distortion in source monitoring

“…In the classic demonstration of this advantage (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977), people encoded single words, either structurally, phonetically, semantically, or self-relevantly, and recall was best for information that was encoded self-relevantly. The effect has been replicated numerous times, for both memory for content (Barney, 2007;Conway & Dewhurst, 1995;Klein & Loftus, 1988) and memory for source (Kahan & Johnson, 1992), and it is thought to reflect elaborative processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). A meta-analysis by Symons and Johnson (1997) suggests that the highly practiced and well-developed knowledge structures associated with the self have a particularly powerful facilitative effect on memory by promoting both elaboration and organization of study materials (see also Klein & Loftus, 1988).…”