Self-referencing: How incessant the stream?

These studies explore alternative interpretations of the failure to find a self-advantage in recall following requests to imagine the self performing actions. Participants imagined someone performing actions involving familiar objects and then recalled those objects. Some were also asked to describe the content of their images to examine the relationship between these images and subsequent memory performance. In visualizing only one person performing actions (the self or a news correspondent), a self-advantage in recall was observed. However, in imagining several people performing different actions (the self, a parent, and a news correspondent), a self-advantage was observed only if reports about the content of images were taken into account in assessing the effects of imagery instructions. These studies indicate that self-referential processing occurs in the absence of explicit requests to process information in this way and sometimes involves the reactivation of a sense of being with another in memory.