The self-reference effect is a tendency for people to encode information differently depending on whether they are implicated in the information. When people are asked to remember information when it is related in some way to themselves, the recall rate can be improved.
Research In 1955, George Kelly published his theory about how humans create personal constructs. This was a more general cognitive theory based on the idea that each individual's psychological processes are influenced by the way they anticipate events. This lays the groundwork for the ideas of personal constructs. Attribution theory is an explanation of the way people attribute the causes of behavior and events, which also involved creating a construct of self, since people can explain things related to themselves differently from the same thing happening to someone else. Related to the attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error is an explanation of when an individual explains someone's given behavior in a situation through emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) rather than considering the situation's external factors. Studies such as one by Jones, Sensenig, and Haley corroborated the idea that the self has a special construct, by simply asking experiment subjects to describe their "most significant characteristics". The results showed that the majority of responses were based on positive characteristics such as "sensitive", "intelligent", and "friendly". This ties in very well with other cognitive phenomena such as illusory superiority, in that it is a well observed fact that people rate themselves differently from how they rate others. In 2012, Stanley B. Klein published an article on the self and memory and how it relates to the self-reference effect. In recent years, studies on the self-reference effect have shifted from identifying mechanisms to using the self-reference as a research tool in understanding the nature of memory. Klein discusses words encoded with respect to oneself (the self-relevance effect) are recalled more often than words that are unrelated to the self. In Japan, regarding memory, people who showed higher altruism tend not to exhibit self-reference effect.
Associated brain regions
Cortical mid-line structures In the past 20 years plus there has been an increase in cognitive neuroscience studies that focus on the concept of the self. These studies were developed in hopes of determining if there are certain brain regions that can account for the encoding advantages involved in the self-reference effect. A great deal of research has been focused on several regions of the brain collectively identified as the cortical midline region. Brain imaging studies have raised the question of whether neural activity in cortical midline regions is self-specific. A quantitative meta-analysis that included 87 studies, representing 1433 participants, was conducted to discuss these questions. The analysis uncovered activity within several cortical midline structures in activities in which participants performed tasks involving the concept of self. Most studies that report such midline activations use tasks that are geared towards uncovering neural processes that are related to social or psychological aspects of the self, such as self-referential judgments, self-appraisal, and judgments of personality traits. Also, in addition to their perceived role in several forms of self-representation, cortical midline structures are also involved in the processing of social relationships and recognizing personally familiar others. Studies that show midline activations during understanding of social interactions between others or ascribing social traits to others (impression formation) typically require subjects to reference the mental state of others.
Prefrontal cortex There are several areas within the cortical midline structure that are believed to be associated with the self-reference effect. One of the more active regions involved in the self-reference effect appears to be the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the area of the brain that is believed to be involved in the planning of complex behavior and the expression and regulation of personality characteristics in social situations. The implication that the prefrontal cortex is involved in the regulation of unique internal personality characteristics illustrates how it may be an important component of the self-reference effect. The medial prefrontal cortex in both hemispheres has been proposed as a site of the "self model" which is a theoretical construct made of essential features such as feelings of continuity and unity as well as experience of agency. The idea of the self-reference effect being linked to the medial prefrontal cortex stems from several experiments attempting to locate the mechanisms involved in the self-referencing process. Experiments in which participants were assigned tasks that required them to reflect on, or introspect about their own mental states showed activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. For example, activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been observed in tasks in which participants report on their own personalities or preferences, adopt a first person perspective, or reflect on their current affective state. Similar activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is displayed in cases where participants show the memory advantage that emerges when items are encoded in a self-relevant manner. During various functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests conducted while participants were performing self-referential tasks, there was a consistent showing of increases in blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signals in the ventral medial and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. Measuring BOLD signals is necessary for a sound interpretation of fMRI signals, as BOLD fMRI reflects a complex monitoring of changes in cerebral blood flow, cerebral blood volume and blood oxygenation.
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