Abstract
The self-reference effect is the tendency for people to better remember information that is processed in reference to the self. Self-reference has been shown to boost source memory, or the retrieval of specific details surrounding the encoding of an item. In a lab setting, self-reference can be induced by a number of tasks, such as the self-descriptiveness task, which asks participants to judge whether words accurately describe the self, or the autobiographical task, which asks participants to think of a personal memory relating to a word. Although both tasks relate information to the self, it has been suggested that these two self-reference tasks rely on qualitatively different types of information, which in turn influences the types of information thought to be encoded into memory. This is the first experiment to provide a direct comparison of the memory benefits of these two tasks for source memory. In this experiment, half the participants encoded words with the autobiographical task, and half with the self-descriptiveness task, followed by a recognition phase where participants had to discriminate under which task the word was encoded (source). Our findings indicate that self-reference encoding tasks enhance source memory as compared to a commonness encoding task, and critically, a self-reference benefit for source memory was seen regardless of the self encoding task used.