Current accounts suggest that self-referential thought serves a pivotal function in the human ability to simulate the future during mind-wandering. Using experience sampling, this hypothesis was tested in two studies that explored the extent to which self-reflection impacts both retrospection and prospection during mind-wandering. Study 1 demonstrated that a brief period of self-reflection yielded a prospective bias during mind-wandering such that participants’ engaged more frequently in spontaneous future than past thought. In Study 2, individual differences in the strength of self-referential (...) thought — as indexed by the memorial advantage for self rather than other-encoded items — was shown to vary with future thinking during mind-wandering. Together these results confirm that self-reflection is a core component of future thinking during mind-wandering and provide novel evidence that a key function of the autobiographical memory system may be to mentally simulate events in the future. (shrink)

An important function of the self is to identify external objects that are potentially personally relevant. We suggest that such objects may be identified through mere ownership. Extant research suggests that encoding information in a self-relevant context enhances memory , thus an experiment was designed to test the impact of ownership on memory performance. Participants either moved or observed the movement of picture cards into two baskets; one of which belonged to self and one which belonged to another participant. A (...) subsequent recognition test revealed that there was a significant memory advantage for objects that were owned by self. Acting on items had no impact on memory. Results are discussed with reference to the importance of self-object associations in cognition. (shrink)

An extensive literature has demonstrated that encoding information in a self-referential manner enhances subsequent memory performance. This ‘self-reference effect’ is generally elicited in paradigms that require participants to evaluate the self-descriptiveness of personality characteristics. Extending work of this kind, the current research explored the possibility that explicit evaluative processing is not a necessary precondition for the emergence of this effect. Rather, responses to self cues may enhance item encoding even in the absence of explicit evaluative instructions. We explored this hypothesis (...) by testing memory for items encoded in either an evaluative or relational context. The relational context was achieved by requesting participants to report the spatial relationship between target stimuli, and visual or verbal referent cues. The results revealed a self-referent memory advantage, regardless of the encoding context or triggering cue. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered. (shrink)

Processing information in the context of personal survival scenarios elicits a memory advantage, relative to other rich encoding conditions such as self-referencing. However, previous research is unable to distinguish between the influence of survival and self-reference because personal survival is a self-referent encoding context. To resolve this issue, participants in the current study processed items in the context of their own survival and a familiar other person’s survival, as well as in a semantic context. Recognition memory for the items revealed (...) that personal survival elicited a memory advantage relative to semantic encoding, whereas other-survival did not. These findings reinforce suggestions that the survival effect is closely tied with self-referential encoding, ensuring that fitness information of potential importance to self is successfully retained in memory. (shrink)