1. Ownership and memory: the ‘Me’ is in Remembering, not in Knowing
Mirjam van den Bos University of Aberdeen 2nd September 2009

2. Self-reference effect
Memory advantage for information that has been encoded with reference to the self
How can it be explained:
- self as superordinate schema (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977)
- ‘any well-differentiated person will do’ (Bower & Gilligan, 1979)
- level of processing effect (Ferguson, Rule, & Carlson, 1983)
- organization & elaboration (Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986; Klein & Loftus, 1988;
Symons & Johnson, 1997 )
Most of us will know what we mean by saying ‘I have a self’. The self is a fundamental construct that guides key aspects of behaviour. Most empirical work has focused on the manner in which self modulates memory function and has revealed that information is better retrieved when it is encoded with reference to the self in an explicit way. For example, your memory for the adjectives ‘intelligent, reliable, friendly’ is better if you’ve asked yourself ‘am I…..’ than if you’ve tried to think of whether, let’s say, Gordon Brown has got these characteristics.
This self-reference effect has been explained in several ways.
Some have argued that the self is a unique schema that influences encoding and retrieval.
Others have argued that there is not such thing as a unique self-schema, but that you get memory enhancement with any well-differentiated person, for example one’s mother. Ferguson and colleagues showed that making an evaluative judgement has the same effect as self-reference and concluded that level of processing was the crucial factor. In the same vein, Klein and colleagues argued that semantic encoding and self-referent encoding would lead to the same results if the amount of organization and elaboration are controlled for.

3. Remembering and Knowing
Conway and Dewhurst (1995)
‘self-relevant information is important and needs to be available for recollective experience’
‘self-schemas enable integration with episodic memory’
Distinction between Remembering and Knowing (Tulving, 1985)
Conway and Dewhurst recognised that it is important for studies dealing with self-memory biases to make a distinction between two different types of memory experience.
In particular, they argued that self-relevant information is important to us and we need to be able to retrieve this information in rich elaborative detail (whereas information about others is not as important and we may need to know that only in a shallow way). They further argued that it is self-schemas that enable self-relevant information to become integrated with episodic memory.
The distinction between remembering and knowing provides an excellent way of investigating this issue. In the remember-know paradigm, participants are asked to respond remember to recognised items if they have a specific recollection of having seen it in the study phase, that is, when they can retrieve sensory aspects of the event or thoughts and feelings they had at the time. In other words, they re-experience the event. Participants are asked to respond know if they recognise the item on the basis of a strong feeling of familiarity but have no recollective experience of it being presented.

4. (Conway & Dewhurst, 1995)
Participants judge adjectives (self, other, valence)
Remember-Know paradigm
Self-Reference Recollection Effect (SRRE) Conway, Dewhurst, Pearson, & Sapute (2001)
In Conway and Dewhursts experiments, participants judged adjectives either for their self-desciptiveness, or how well they described a distant other, or they rated the valence of the adjectives. In the second part of the experiment, participants performed a Remember Know task.
They found that there were no reliable effects of self-referencing on overall recognition, but consistent and large effects were observed in recognition accompanied by recollective experience (but not in recognition accompanied by a feeling of familiarity). Conway and colleagues (2001) later termed this effect the Self Reference Recollection Effect (SRRE).

5. Activation of self-concept in a less explicit way
Association between Self and owned objects (Belk, 1988; Beggan, 1991)
Beggan (1992): owned objects more favourable
Shopping paradigm (Cunningham, Turk, Macdonald, & Macrae, 2008)
What does it tell us? What does it NOT tell us?
The problem is that in research mentioned so far, self-referential mental activity has been triggered through
explicit instruction; specifically, directed evaluative processing (‘are you enigmatic?’). However, what’s become clear over the centuries that the self can and does guide cognition in an implicit, unobtrusive manner.
This then gives rise to an important functional question. Is it possible to get patterns of memory performance that show that the self is involved,
but without the necessity of explicit self-referencing?
One possible route for investigating this issue took me to the literature on the self and owned objects. Belk and Beggan showed that possessions sometimes are used to define self, as extensions of self or to make up for characteristics that one lacks.
Beggan also showed that objects were seen as more favourable by their owners than by non-owners and he assumed that this was because the objects were regarded as extensions of the self and people tend to regard their own traits and abilities as more positive than those of others.
On the basis of this, Cunningham and colleagues hypothesized that the impact of ownership might extend beyond evaluative processing, namely to memory, in a similar way as the self-reference effect.
In Cunningham et al.’s (2008) Shopping Paradigm, two participants (one genuine participant and one confederate) were asked to imagine they had each won a basket full of shopping items, represented by cards with photos of shopping items. Each card also showed a colour cue, corresponding to one of the baskets (red or blue). The experimenter handed the cards to the participants one by one and participants were asked to put the cards in the basket with the corresponding colour. Participants were asked to imagine that they owned the items in their baskets. A surprise memory test showed that memory performance was better for self-owned items than for other-owned items.
What this tells us, is that the self-concept indeed can be activated without explicit evaluation.
However, what it doesn’t tell us is HOW participants recognised the items. A simple ‘yes’ doesn’t tell us much. It could be that all self-owned items for some reason unknown to the participant felt highly familiar and that’s why they pressed the yes button. Or it could be that they had specific recollections of seeing the item on the screen and this evidence made them respond yes. It’s important to know how the self-owned items were recognised, as this tells us much about what happens when you are told that you own something.
Therefore, it is necessary to make the distinction between remembering and knowing, as Conway and Dewhurst did.
What we wanted to find out was whether the effect they found, namely the memory enhancement for remember responses, would also occur in the ownership paradigm, in which the self-concept is activated in a much less explicit way.

6. Current experiment Stimuli: 150 images: - 50 self-owned targets
- 50 other-owned targets
- 50 distractors at test
Single-factor (Ownership) within-subjects design
To this end, we created a stimulus set of 150 photos of shopping items for sale in a large supermarket. 50 of these were assigned to self, 50 assigned to a fictive other and the remaining 50 were used as distractors at test.
So, the within-subjects factor Ownership had two levels: self-owned and other-owned.

7. Participants were told that they were taking part in a shopping experiment and they had to imagine that they and a fictive other student called John had each won their own basket with shopping items.
So, two baskets were presented on the screen and they were told, for example: the red basket is yours, the blue basket is Johns. (but the colour of the self-owned basket was counterbalanced across participants) The items were then presented in a new random order for every participant. Each item remained on screen for 1.5 seconds, after which a coloured border appeared around the item.

8. If participant owned the red basket, they were told that every time a red border appeared, this item was theirs and they had to put this item into their own basket by pressing the red button on the keyboard.

9. If participant owned the red basket, they were told that every time a red border appeared, this item was theirs and they had to put this item into their own basket by pressing the red button on the keyboard.

10. On another trial, a blue border might appear, which meant that this item belonged to the other person and they had to put this item into John’s basket by pressing the blue button on the keyboard.

13. Test: 2-step RKG 1: ‘yes’ or ‘no’
2: Remember (specific memory, with details)
Know (strong feeling of familiarity)
Guess
After all of the 100 shopping items had been sorted, a surprise memory test followed. Participants first had to make a yes no response as to whether they recognised the item, and after each yes response they had to indicate the basis of their response: remember, know or guess.

14. Prediction:
ownership effect in recognition accompanied by recollective experience (similar to SRRE)
We predicted that memory performance would be better for objects that were assigned to self, but only for recognition accompanied by recollective experience. This is similar to the self-reference recollection effect found by Conway and Dewhurst, but then under conditions that didn’t explicitly force participants to make an evaluative judgement.

15. Results Ownership: F(1,27) = 6.389, p = .018
The two ownership conditions had no separate false-alarm rates, therefore I’ll only focus on the hit rates.
First of all, a significant effect of ownership was observed on the overall hit rates: more self owned items than other owned items were recognised
Ownership: F(1,27) = 6.389, p = .018

16. (Results) Ownership x Response Type F(1,27) = 11.422, p = .002
Then, we applied a two-factor ANOVA to remember and know hit rates, and, we found our very much hoped for interaction effect!
This interaction effect was such that an ownership effect was observed only for remember responses, so for recognition accompanied by recollective experience, but no ownership effect was observed for know responses.
Ownership x Response Type F(1,27) = , p = .002
Remember: F(1,27) = , p = .003
Know: F(1,27) = , p = .130

17. Discussion
How do the present data relate to Conway and Dewhurst’s SRRE?
How about other studies that only examined ‘overall’ data?
So how do the present data relate to what has been observed by other researchers? Well, as you may recall, Conway and Dewhurst found no reliable effect of self-referential encoding on the overall data. They did observe this memory bias in the remember responses, but not in the know responses. In the present experiment, support was found for this latter finding: a self-memory bias, in this case an ownership effect, was found for remember responses, but not for know responses. However, we also found an ownership effect for the overall data.
This suggests that if the contribution of recognition accompanied by recollective experience to overall recognition is relatively large, as in the present study, an ownership effect can be detected on overall recognition. That is, the finding of an ownership effect on overall recognition in the present experiment can be regarded as a variation on the SRRE: it can easily be seen that as the relative contribution of remember responses to overall recognition increases, it is likely that overall recognition performance will be better in the self-owned conditions than in the other-owned condition.
Previous studies examining self-memory bias, as reported by Symons and Johnson (1997) only analysed old-new (overall) recognition data, so it is likely that these studies would have observed greater effects had they made a distinction between remembering and knowing.

18. Spontaneous elaboration Arousal? Ecological function?
(Discussion)
Spontaneous elaboration
Arousal?
Ecological function?
So what does this tell us? Previous studies, which used trait judgement tasks, explicitly forced participants to engage in self-referencing and elaboration, otherwise you cannot answer the question ‘does this trait describe you?’. In contrast, in the present study, all participants did was dividing a set of shopping item pictures into a self and other category, which does not require any elaboration.
So…. the fact that an ownership effect emerged in recognition accompanied by recollective experience, implies that elaboration of the study items must have occurred spontaneously.
In other words, even under conditions where the self-construct is activated only to a minimal extent, potential self-relevant information is encoded in such a way that it's easily retrievable in great detail.
So how does this spontaneous elaboration happen? One possibility is through arousal that occurs when you receiving something. Previous research has suggested that memory performance is better for material that has been encoded under arousal conditions. However, it’s possible also to feel high arousal by someone else receiving something you would want (so you should have a better memory for these items too). Maybe arousal is not the best explanation, or at least, not the only explanation.
Cunningham and colleagues emphasized the ecological advantage in preferentially encoding items that you own. The present data have shown that not all types of recognition are equally well suited to support this ecological function. Specifically,it could be argued that an undifferentiated feeling of familiarity towards previously seen items does not bear a great ecological advantage, as one can be equally familiar with items that belong to someone else as with items that belong to self. Specific recollection, whereby one re-experiences the event in rich, elaborate detail and where one remembers ones own role in the event is necessary to distinguish items that are previously experienced and belong to self from items that also were previously experienced but do not belong to self.

19. Thank you

20. References
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,
Beggan, J. K. (1992). On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62,
Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15,
Bower, G. H., & Gilligan, S. G. (1979). Remembering information related to one's self. Journal of Research in Personality, 13,
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,

21. (references)
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.
Ferguson, T. J,, Rule, G. R., & Carlson, D. ( 1983 ). Memory for personally relevant information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44,
Klein, S. B., & Kihlstrom, J. E (1986). Elaboration, organization, and the self-reference effect in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115,
Klein, S. B., & Loftus, J. (1988). The nature of self-referent encoding: The contribution of elaborative and organizational processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 5-11.
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,
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.

22. Raw data Means and Standard Deviations of Overall Recognition,
Remember Hit Rate (HTR) and Know HTR, by Ownership
Conditions.
Ownership
Self
Other
Overall HTR X SD
.781
.209
.746
.192
Remember HTR X
.561
.221
.479
.235
Know HTR X
.178
.128
.218
Guess HTR X
.042
.066
.050
.060

23. (Raw data) Means and Standard Deviations of Remember, Know
and Guess False-Alarm Rates.
False-Alarm Rates
Remember
Know
Guess X SD
.009
.018
.042
.064
.026
.040