THE SELF AND RECOLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that self-reference at e ncoding increases the probability of recollective experience in recogn ition memory. In all three experiments separate groups of subjects stu died words naming personality traits. One group judged the self-releva nce of the traits, the other groups performed orientating tasks low in self-reference. In a recognition test subjects first identified old i tems and then indicated which of these were accompanied by recollectiv e experience ('remember' responses) and which were recognized on some other basis ('know' responses). No reliable differences in overall rec ognition performance between seif-referent and semantic encoding tasks were observed. However, subjects who encoded trait adjectives with re ference 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 retent ion interval, while Experiment 2 found this effect to persist over a 2 4-hour retention interval. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this self-re ference effect is obtained under incidental as well as under intention al 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 exper ience.