Content area
Full Text
These studies explore alternative interpretations of the failure to find a self-advantage in recall following requests to imagine the self performing actions. Participants imagined someone performing actions involving familiar objects and then recalled those objects. Some were also asked to describe the content of their images to examine the relationship between these images and subsequent memory performance. In visualizing only one person performing actions (the self or a news correspondent), a self-advantage in recall was observed. However, in imagining several people performing different actions (the self, a parent, and a news correspondent), a self-advantage was observed only if reports about the content of images were taken into account in assessing the effects of imagery instructions. These studies indicate that self-referential processing occurs in the absence of explicit requests to process information in this way and sometimes involves the reactivation of a sense of being with another in memory.
When listening to others tell of their life experiences or when watching absorbing movies, people often report thinking about or describing personal experiences resembling those portrayed in the stories or films (Golden, Foley, Holtz, & Lynde,1994). The automatic and effortless character of this self-referential processing was described by Freud when he wrote, "An incessant stream of self-reference flows through my thoughts.... It seems as if I am forced to compare with my own person all that I hear about strangers" (Freud, 1901/1917, pp. 41-42). To what extent does this spontaneous self-referential processing occur? When it does, are there consequences for memory?
Self-referential processing is induced in many ways: by asking people to evaluate the appropriateness of adjectives as self-descriptors (Keenan & Baillet,1980; Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker,1977), evaluate the likelihood of their success at various kinds of jobs (Keenan, Golding, & Brown, 1992), or retrieve autobiographical episodes illustrative of the ways in which adjectives are self-descriptive (Klein, Loftus, & Burton, 1989). Compared to other kinds of processing tasks, orienting tasks that are designed to induce self-referential processing enhance memory, an enhancement called the self-referent effect (Bellezza & Hoyt, 1992; Bower & Gilligan,1979; Greenwald,1985; Higgins & Bargh,1987; Kihlstrom, Cantor, Albright, Chew, Klein, & Niedenthal, 1988; Keenan & Baillet, 1980; Keenan et al., 1992; McCaul & Maki, 1984; Rogers et al., 1977). As yet, however, investigations of the spontaneous...