The self-reference effect in memory: A meta-analysis

“For example, empirical studies have elucidated the influence of self-schemas on attribution (e.g., the false consensus effect; Marks & Miller, 1987), judgments of self‐other similarity (Srull & Gaelick, 1983), the encoding of other-referent information in memory ( Symons & Johnson, 1997 ), and the organization of soci…”

“It is established that self-referencing during encoding benefits memory operations as it produces both organized and elaborate processing (Symons and Johnson, 1997), and stronger connectivity between the hippocampus and the posterior cingulate cortex could thus promote memory consolidation.”

“Previous work has consistently shown that memory in young adults is better for self-related stimuli than for stimuli related to other people—the self-reference effect in memory (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Cunningham, Turk, Macdonald, & Macrae, 2008; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“Although some of these memory benefits may reflect memory storage processes that unfold over time, at least some of these memory benefits arise from the way that emotional or self-referential information is initially processed and encoded into memory [4,7].”

“Compared to items associated with other people, self-relevant material is easier to detect, judge, and remember (Bargh & Pratto, 1986; Keyes & Brady, 2010; Kuiper & Rogers, 1979; Shapiro, Caldwell, & Sorensen, 1997; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“A further example is the self-reference effect in memory [Symons & Johnson, 1997]: the term given to the finding that selfrelevant material is remembered better than other-relevant material.”

“Generally, self-relevant information (as opposed to information related to other people) is processed very efficiently (see [59] for a review) by activating unique brain regions (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex [60]).”

“A highresolution T1-weighted structural scan (MP-RAGE) was conducted following the four functional runs for the agentic self-reference task and preceding the two functional runs for the conceptual self-reference task.”

“This conclusion contrasts with the behavioral results as well as with several previous findings predicting overall better memory and prioritized processing for self-related information (self-reference effect; for a meta-study, see Symons and Johnson, 1997).”

“In studies investigating the SRE, memory is usually tested in a surprise recall task at the end of a range of judgment tasks (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“SRE is shown as a comparison of self-reflection accessing a basic level of semantic knowledge; however, there are also comparisons of the self with other people, especially those distant from the participant (Symons and Johnson, 1997; Yaoi et al., 2009).”

“Advantage of using this variable is that it controls for group differences in overall rates of endorsement (Symons and Johnson, 1997).”

“The SRE has been found in healthy participants consistently under a variety of conditions (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977; for a review, see Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“Self-knowledge has been considered as a unique cognitive structure based on behavior experiments (Symons & Johnson, 1997): Reportedly, memory performance is enhanced when information is processed as a self-knowledge task (e.g., Does the word describe you?”

“making behavior change more likely [8–10].”

“…studies, where self-referentially encoded information is retrieved more accurately on a subsequent memory task, relative to information that has been encoded in relation to another person (other-reference) or based on its physical or semantic features (Rogers et al., 1977; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“The self-referencing effect is based on cognitive systems that process and store self- versus other-related information differently (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“For example, participants better remember information when judgements are referred to the self compared to when judgements are made in reference to other people (e.g., Cunningham, Turk, & Macrae, 2008; see Symons & Johnson, 1997, for a review).”

“The SRE using nouns is typically obtained with self-reference tasks promoting autobiographical memory retrieval, while the SRE using adjectives is found with tasks requiring participants to describe their personality (for reviews, see Symons and Johnson, 1997; Klein, 2012).”

“Rather than relying on elaboration and organization by the self-knowledge framework (Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986; Klein & Loftus, 1988; Symons & Johnson, 1997), low-level responses to self-cues are likely to drive the effects, particularly increases in attention to self-relevant stimuli.”

“The experimental tasks used to study the self-reference effect may have varied over the years (Symons and Johnson, 1997; Turk et al., 2008), but have focused persistently on self-other comparison, including self-referent vs other-referent judments in neurosience or cultural neurosience (Kelley et…”

“, 2009), memory (Symons and Johnson, 1997) and even meta-cognition (Pronin et al.”

“Furthermore, memory tends to be better for items encoded in relation to oneself compared with items encoded in relation to others (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“Finally, in the domain of memory, it has been repeatedly shown that humans have superior memory for material that has been related to the self, a finding referred to as the self-reference effect (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“…that the personal association and description (physical-property) feature categories would demonstrate particularly robust effects on treatment gains, based on previous findings from the memory and learning literatures (Bower & Winzenz, 1970; Rogers et al., 1977; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“Here, we examine affective and cognitive aspects of self-referential processing – self- positivity biases and self-referenced memory (SRM), respectively – which develop throughout childhood and serve adaptive social functions [Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Symons & Johnson, 1997; Uddin, 2011].”

“Previous research has shown that relating information to oneself is a successful encoding strategy (Symons and Johnson, 1997).”

“One strategy that improves memory is relating information to oneself or self-referencing (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“This proportion of self-referent recall controlled for individual differences in endorsement (Symons and Johnson, 1997; Ramel, et al ., 2007).”

“Further, there is strong support in the literature that information that is self-referent in some manner (eg, personally relevant) to an individual will result in greater elaboration and organisation of the material during encoding and significantly greater recall compared to information that does not have this same p…”

“( 1999 ) cite evidence suggesting that episodic memory is more reliable than other kinds of memory (Wheeler et al, 1997 ), and that self-based referencing structures demonstrate stability over time (Symons and Johnson, 1997 ).”

“The underlying nature of the SRE is uncertain, with theories usually postulating that it results from the self-concept being a particularly well-organised, emotion-arousing and often-used schema (Symons and Johnson, 1997).”

“…suggest that any rich, highly familiar cognitive structure could be used to enhance memory, although an advantage for self-referencing over these comparison conditions does emerge in within-subjects designs (McCaul & Maki, 1984) and was documented in a meta-analysis (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“This assumption was based, in part, on the finding that definition generation had been used successfully as a control task in many self-reference effect studies (for review, see Symons & Johnson, 1997 ).”

“The self acts as a schema promoting both the elaboration and organisation of information during encoding (Markus, 1977; Symons & Johnson, 1997), as demonstrated by the higher recall of self-descriptive traits rather than unrelated traits following a self-reference task (Bellezza, 1992).”

“ineffective for self-referential encoding because the self already serves as its own retrieval cue system [6].”

“Our findings were consistent with the previous studies (Symons and Johnson, 1997; Miyakoshi et al., 2007; Zhao et al., 2009).”

“Moreover, self-related information can be better stored in memory than information related to others (e.g., Sparks, Cunningham, & Kritikos, 2016; Symons & Johnson, 1997) and individuals tend to ascribe more positive attributes to both items and situations related to themselves than to others (e.g.,…”

“More in particular, Greenwald and Banaji (1995) and others (e.g., Gawronski et al., 2007; Symons & Johnson, 1997; Walter & Traselli, 2003; Zhang & Chan, 2009; Perugini, Richetin & Zogmaister, 2012) have argued and shown that the self possesses both the necessary and sufficient attributes to take on…”

“The validity of the task was ascertained by behavioral and fMRI within-group results (Symons and Johnson, 1997; van der Meer et al., 2010) and the sample size was large enough to conduct whole-brain analyses that demonstrated the specificity of dorsal MPFC and ACC function between groups.”

“There is extensive and robust evidence for this effect, and it occurs across a range of memory tasks and encoding conditions (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“It is well established that individuals pay more attention to, and demonstrate quicker recall of, information that is consistent with their own self-schema (Markus, 1977; Markus & Sentis, 1982; Symons & Johnson, 1997 ).”

“Other researchers (e.g., Klein and Loftus, 1988; Symons and Johnson, 1997) have suggested that these beneficial effects occur because personal information encourages more elaborative processing and is easier to process categorically.”

“The effectiveness of this strategy has clear empirical footing from more than a half century of research in the self-reference effect, a phenomenon characterised by superior encoding (and retrieval) for information that is encoded with reference to the self (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“…has long been known that information is often better remembered when it is encoded with reference to the self (Rogers et al., 1977), possibly because “the self is a well-developed and often-used construct that promotes elaboration and organization of encoded information” (Symons and Johnson, 1997).”

“This explanation can be traced back to the self-referential effect (e.g., Klein & Loftus, 1988; Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“…attention focus that also leads to the overall best memory encoding for these self-relevant words, i.e., the self-reference effect in memory; Symons and Johnson, 1997), may be more difficult to maintain under conditions of joint than individual encoding because of the…”

“…& Cunningham, 2017; Sui, He, & Humphreys, 2012; Sui, Rotshtein, & Humphreys, 2013), attention (Alexopoulos, Muller, Ric, & Marendaz, 2012; Humphreys & Sui, 2015), and memory (Cunningham, Turk, Macdonald, & Macrae, 2008; Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977; Sui et al., 2012; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“The equally good performance of the self-referencing group compared to that of the SQ4R group supported the contention of Symons and Johnson (1997), Benjamin (1991), and Lord (1980) that self-referencing is an especially important component of deeper information-processing strategies.”

“The self-reference effect reflects the aspect that people remembered information better, when it was encoded with respect to themselves rather than with respect to other referential frames (Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“Compared to material paired with other people (e.g., friend, mother, celebrity), information associated with the self is easier to detect, evaluate, and remember (e.g., Bargh & Pratto, 1986; Keyes & Brady, 2010; Kuiper & Rogers, 1979; Shapiro, Caldwell, & Sorensen, 1997; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“…more difficult, we hypothesized that self-referent cues would more successfully help participants locate their possessions than would other-referent cues, a prediction consistent with the results of Experiment 1 and with the self-referent effect (Rogers et al., 1977; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”

“This result corroborates the notion of the socalled “self-reference effect” (Rogers et al., 1977; Symons and Johnson, 1997) and the phenomenon of a deeper processing and correspondingly better later memory performance for material referred to an intimate person (Bower and Gilligan, 1979; Miall, 1986).”

“Theoretical considerations (James, 1890; Conway and PleydellPearce, 2000; Gardiner, 2001), as well as behavioral ones (Rogers et al., 1977; Symons and Johnson, 1997) along with neuroimaging findings (Fletcher et al.”

“In addition, the motivationally relevant nature of affective stimuli increases physiological arousal, thereby increasing cognitive appraisal and encoding strength, augmenting memory for affective events (Christianson & Engelberg, 1999; LeDoux, 2000; Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977; Symons & Johnson, 1997 ).”

“This effect also generalizes to close others (for a meta-analytic review see Symons & Johnson, 1997 ).”

“But there is evidence that information relating to the self, as opposed to other topics, is better recalled, has an increased personal relevance and meaning for individuals and relates to different cognitive processes and emotional underpinnings [58,59,74,75].”

“…are defined by the fact that they are self-referring (Brewer, 1986), and extensive research demonstrates that we are biased to remember self-related information (i.e., self-memory bias; Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Cunningham et al., 2008; Sui and Humphreys, 2017; Symons and Johnson, 1997).”

“The self-effect in young adults relates to several evidence that autobiographically relevant information boosts both memory encoding and retrieval (see also [35, 36]).”

“Self-related information is processed rather deep and elaborate (‘self-reference effect’; Symons and Johnson, 1997).”

“…using categorization, the creation of sentences or mental images (e.g., Bryan et al., 1999; Hertzog, Price, & Dunlosky, 2008), item-specific processing such as elaboration of individual items or self-reference encoding, and repetition (e.g., Camp, Markley, & Kramer, 1983; Symons & Johnson, 1997).”