The role of attention in the emergence of the evaluative and incidental self-reference effects

ABSTRACT

The self-reference effect (SRE) is a memory advantage produced by encoding information in a self-relevant manner. The “evaluative” SRE arises when people engage in explicit self-evaluation/reflection to process to-be-remembered items, while the “incidental” SRE occurs when self-referential information (e.g., one’s own name) is co-presented with to-be-remembered items but is irrelevant to a given task. Using a divided-attention paradigm, the present study examined potential differences in the attentional requirements of the evaluative and incidental SREs. During encoding, personality-trait words were presented simultaneously with the participant’s own or a celebrity’s name. The participants’ task was either to evaluate whether each word described themselves/the celebrity (evaluative encoding) or to indicate the location of each word (incidental encoding), in the presence or absence of a secondary task. A subsequent recognition test with a remember/know procedure showed better overall recognition and enhanced episodic recollection for words presented with one’s own name vs. another name, with this SRE being larger in the evaluative than incidental encoding condition. Critically, divided attention at encoding attenuated the magnitudes of both evaluative and incidental SREs to a comparable degree in overall recognition and episodic recollection. These findings suggest that both the evaluative and incidental SREs are resource-demanding, effortful mnemonic benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• self
• memory
• attention
• self-reference
• remember-know

Acknowledgments

We thank research assistants in the Memory, Cognition, and Self (MCS) Lab at Wesleyan University for their help with data collection and helpful discussions.

Data availability statement

All data have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/yd9c3/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A response deadline at test has been shown to decrease recollection, a relatively slower process (Düzel et al., 1997; Woodruff et al., 2006), while leaving familiarity largely unaffected (e.g., Benjamin & Craik, 2001; Yonelinas & Jacoby, 1994). Given our specific focus on examining attentional demands of self-related encoding processes giving rise to the evaluative and incidental SREs, we chose not to impose a response deadline during the memory test.

2 A parallel set of analyses using d-prime (d’) as the dependent measure yielded exactly the same pattern of significant and nonsignificant effects.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Grant in Support of Scholarship (GISOS) from Wesleyan University.