THE SELF-REFERENCE EFFECT - METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES AND IMPLICATIONS FROM A SCHEMA-THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

A number of investigators demonstrated that processing verbal stimuli by encoding them in reference to the self facilitates recall for these stimuli, compared with other kinds of semantic processing. On the bas is of a critical discussion of the relevant research, it is hypothesiz ed that the superiority of self-reference is due to some specific feat ures of semantic orienting tasks that serve as control groups for self -referent encoding. This hypothesis is tested in three experiments dem onstrating that, when changing certain features of these semantic orie nting tasks, the self-reference-effect (SRE) is no longer obtained In Experiment 3, the statistical difficulties are addressed that arise wh en not rejecting the null-hypothesis. Furthermore, several implication s of schema-oriented explanations of the SRE are tested Several depend ent measures provide evidence in support of the motion that a self-sch ema is activated during encoding and retrieval of self-relevant materi al. However, results show that self-referent processing - in contrast to the most general claim of the relevant literature- does not lead to superior recollection.