Self-reference and the encoding of personal information

Conducted 2 experiments with 59 undergraduates to investigate the degree to which the self is implicated in processing personal information. Ss rated adjectives on 4 tasks designed to force varying kinds of encoding: structural, phonemic, semantic, and self-reference. Incidental recall of the rate words indicated that adjectives rated under the self-reference task were recalled the best. 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. (32 ref)