title: Self-reference and the encoding of personal information.
abstract: The degree to which the self is implicated in processing personal information was investigated. Subjects rated adjectives on four tasks designed to force varying kinds of encoding: structural, phonemic, semantic, and self-reference. In two experiments, incidental recall of the rated words indicated that adjectives rates under the self-reference task were recalled the best. These results indicate that self-reference is a rich and powerful encoding process. As an aspect of the human information-processing system, the self appears to function as a superordinate schema that is deeply involved in the processing, interpretation, and memory of personal information.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001244:Association; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D010700:Phonetics; D012649:Self Concept; D012660:Semantics