The Self-Reference Effect and Mental Cueing

Abstract

The Self-Reference Effect (SRE) results from the formation and utilization of mental cues and is not the result of special mnemonic properties of the self. Properties of mental cues, such as constructibility, associability, discriminability, and bidirectionality, are necessary for mental cues to be effective and are briefly described. Although SREs have often been reported in the literature, evidence is reviewed demonstrating that self-reference processing does not always result in the best recall performance. An experiment was performed in which four types of mental cues, including some associated with the self, were evaluated for their ability to support free recall. Names of friends used as mental cues were found to be slightly superior to places in one's house and much superior to personal experiences. Names of friends and house locations resulted in the best recall because they are more constructible as mental cues than are personal experiences. Names of fruits, though constructible, were not as effective as names of friends; therefore, we suggest that representations of fruits in memory suffer from lack of discriminability. The results do not support the cue-variety hypothesis of Greenwald and Banaji (1989), which states that any easily retrieved set of items in memory, such as names of fruits, can function as effective mental cues. We suggest that the self can be viewed as the representation in memory of familiar world knowledge. If indeed the self as a theoretical construct involves more than this, then the SRE is not the appropriate paradigm to study the self.