Mirjam Brady-Van den BosUniversity of Aberdeen

Forever young?Self-memory biases are impervious

to ageing

Self and Memory

• Does this trait describe you?

• Does this trait describe Person X?

• Memory advantage for information linked

to self:

Self Reference Effect (SRE)

intelligent

reliable

• Objects used to define, extend or compensate self (Belk, 1988; Beggan, 1991; James, 1890)

• Better memory for self-owned objects?

‘You are what you own’

Shopping paradigm (Cunningham, Turk, Macdonald, & Macrae, 2008)

Study: 72 self-owned targets, 72 other-owned targets

Test: 144 targets + 72 distractors

0.5

0.55

0.6

0.65

0.7

Hit

rat

eOwnership

selfother

F(1,29) = 8.56, p = .007

Ownership effect: Self > Other

Remembering and Knowing

• Conway and Dewhurst (1995):

‘self-relevant information is important and needs to be available for recollective experience’

‘information about others may not be as important’

• Remember-Know paradigm (Tulving, 1985)

• Self-Reference Recollection Effect (SRRE) Conway, Dewhurst, Pearson, & Sapute (2001)

So… would we find the Ownership Effect only in the Remember responses?

• Episodic memory (esp. recall) declines dramatically (reviews: Glisky, 2007; Kester, Benjamin, Castel, & Craik, 2002; Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000)

• Certain processes remain relatively unaffected by even advanced ageing

• Glisky and Marquine (2009):elaborative processing

‘pure’ self-processing

Self-referencing =

Decline esp. in 75+

Testing older participants (65+)

+

• Subjects: young-old (65-74) and old-old (75+)

• Psychometric test: Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) (Folstein, Folstein, & McHugh, 1975)

• Shopping paradigm with yes-no, followed by Remember-Know-Guess:

• 1: ‘yes’ or ‘no’

• 2: Remember (specific memory, with details)

Know (strong feeling of familiarity, no details)

Guess

Ageing Experiment

Predictions

• Young-Old: ownership effect in R, but not in K

• Old-Old: ownership effect in K, but not in R

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

corr

ecte

d h

it r

ate

Remember Know

self-owned

other-owned

Ownership effect in R responses F(1,9) = 7.721, p = .021

but not in K responses F(1,9) = 1.385, p = ns

Young-old participants

Ownership effect only in K responsesF(1,9) = 5.803, p = .039,

but not in R responses F(1,9) = 0.225, p = ns

Old-old participants

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

corr

ecte

d h

it r

ate

Remember Know

self-owned

other-owned

Conclusions

• The nature of the Ownership Effect

- self affects cognition through indirect ways

• Effects based on: 1. elaboration 2. affect, arousal

• Self-memory bias preserved with ageing

Thank you!

Beggan, J. K. (1991). Using what you own to get what you need: The role of possessions in satisfying control motivation. [Special Issue]. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6, 129-146.

Beggan, J. K. (1992). On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 229-237.

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 139-168.

Bower, G. H., & Gilligan, S. G. (1979). Remembering information related to one's self. Journal of Research in Personality, 13, 420-432.

Conway, M. A.,& Dewhurst, S. A. (1995). The self and recollective experience. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 9, 1-19.

Conway, M. A., Dewhurst, S. A., Pearson, N., & Sapute, A. (2001). The self and recollection reconsidered:How a ‘failure to replicate’ failed and why trace strength accounts of recollection are untenable. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 15, 673-686.

Cunningham, S. J., Turk, D. J., MacDonald, L. M., & Macrae, C. N. (2008). Yours or Mine? Ownership and memory. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 312–318.

Glisky, E. L., & Marquine, M. J. (2009). Semantic and self-referential processing of positive and negative trait adjectives in older adults. Memory, 17, 144–157.

Grady, C. L., & Craik, F. I. M. (2000). Changes in memory processing with age. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 10, 224-231.

References

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology, Vol 1. New York: Holt.

Ferguson, T. J,, Rule, G. R., & Carlson, D. (1983). Memory for personally relevant information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 251-261.

Folstein, M.F., Folstein, S.E., & McHugh, P.R. (1975). Mini-mental state: a practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 12, 189-198.

Klein, S. B., & Kihlstrom, J. E (1986). Elaboration, organization, and the self-reference effect in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115, 26-38.

LeDoux, J. (2003). The emotional brain, fear and the amygdala. Cellular and molecular Neurobiology, 23, 227-238.

Naveh-Benjamin, M. (2000). Adult Age Differences in Memory Performance: Tests of an Associative Deficit Hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognilion, 26(5), 1170-1187.

Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N.A., & Kirker, W.S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 677-688.

Symons, C. S., & Johnson, B. T. (1997). The self-reference effect in memory: A meta- analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 371–394.

Tulving, E. (1985). Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology, 25, 1-12.

Incidental self cuee.g. own

name, image, possession

cue of action require

d

cue of threat

/ danger

Explicit self-relevant instruction e.g. ‘are

you …?’

Conscious evaluations of self

Affective

response /

arousal

Attention

capture

Enriched

encoding

COMPARABLE NON-SELF PROCESSES

INCIDENTAL SYSTEM

EXPLICIT SYSTEM

COMPARABLE NON-SELF PROCESSES

deep processing with

organisational strategy

stereotype activated during encoding

Activation of self concept

Increased recollect

ive experienc

e

organization

elaboration

automatic

Model of Self-Referential Cognition

(Remember)

Incidental self cuee.g. own

name, image, possession

cue of action require

d

cue of threat

/ danger

Explicit self-relevant instruction e.g. ‘are

you …?’

Conscious evaluations of self

Affective

response /

arousal

Attention

capture

Enriched

encoding

COMPARABLE NON-SELF PROCESSES

INCIDENTAL SYSTEM

EXPLICIT SYSTEM

COMPARABLE NON-SELF PROCESSES

deep processing with

organisational strategy

stereotype activated during encoding

Activation of self concept

Increased recollect

ive experienc

e

organization

elaboration

Not automatic ???

Model of Self-Referential Cognition

(Remember)

Incidental self cuee.g. own

name, image, possession

cue of action require

d

cue of threat

/ danger

Explicit self-relevant instruction e.g. ‘are

you …?’

Conscious evaluations of self

Affective

response /

arousal

Attention

capture

Enriched

encoding

COMPARABLE NON-SELF PROCESSES

INCIDENTAL SYSTEM

EXPLICIT SYSTEM

COMPARABLE NON-SELF PROCESSES

deep processing with

organisational strategy

stereotype activated during encoding

Activation of self concept

Increased recollect

ive experienc

e

organization

elaboration

Impaired

If no elaboration, then Ownership effect in Know responses?

Preserved

Increased feelings

of familiarity (Know)

Model of Self-Referential Cognition – Older Participants

(Remember)

Outline

• Self-reference effect

• Creating self-effects with less explicit methods:

Shopping Paradigm

• Experiment with older (65+) adults

• Conclusion