Making memorable choices: Cognitive control and the self-choice effect in memory

ABSTRACT

The current research tested the effects of active choice on memory (i.e., the self-choice effect). Across 14 experiments (N = 1100) we found that memory for choice alternatives was improved by choosing versus being assigned information to remember. A subset of 3 experiments found a bigger self-choice effect for more difficult choices. And a subset of 6 experiments found that prior acts of self-control reduce the self-choice effect. These findings represent unbiased estimates of the self-choice effect (d = 0. 62), the magnitude of the self-choice effect for easy (d = 0.35) versus more difficult (d = 0.87) choices, and the effect of ego depletion on choice memory (d = 0.39). Discussion centers on the role of cognitive control.

KEYWORDS:

• Choice
• ego depletion
• cognitive control
• memory
• self-choice effect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Footnote: We borrowed this terminology (“the self-choice effect”) from prior work (see Kuhl & Kazén, 1994). However, the role of the self in the self-choice effect is debatable. We consider the debate in the General Discussion.

2. The empirical status of the ego depletion effect has been the focus of extensive scrutiny and doubt. We address the status of the ego depletion effect in the General Discussion.

3. We do not consider cognitive load to be equivalent to ego depletion (see Maranges et al., 2017), so we did not include the cognitive load conditions when testing for ego depletion effects. Rather, we collapsed across cognitive load conditions for the current analyses.

4. Experiments 1 and 2 used within subjects designs, so for those experiments we divided by the SD of the differences to obtain effect sizes, which were then converted to a metric comparable to between-subjects effect sizes following Morris and DeShon (2002).

5. With a small number of studies the T² estimate of population variance may be imprecise (Borenstein et al., 2010). Estimating the effect sizes from our experiments using unweighted means (e.g., Goh et al., 2016) returned highly similar results.

6. The idea that ego depletion has a single true effect size has also attracted criticism. Ego depletion may be akin to fatigue, which almost certainly varies by degree. Cunningham and Baumeister (2016) pursued this analogy by suggesting it would be absurd to query how much slower a tired person runs a mile than a fresh person, as if there were a single true amount by which all degrees of tiredness affected running speed. Some research has found that different degrees of ego depletion produce quantitatively different results (e.g., Vohs et al., 2012). Hence effect size estimates may vary across contexts and tasks apart from the fundamental question of whether there is a real effect or not.