Memorizing semantic, structural and self-referential information: A comparative account of Indian adolescents and adults

Pages:5-10
Aakriti Varshney (Practicing Clinical Psychologist)
Ritu Sharma (Assistant Professor, AIPS)

Self-referent information helps in processing of the material more accurately. The information referred to self is known to enhance the memory. This effect on memory is known as self-reference effect. In the present study, we examined the self-reference effect of memory in adolescence and adults through conducting an experiment. The experiment was a replication of Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker’s (1977) experiment on self-referent encoding. The sampling method used was purposive sampling which comprised of ninety participants (45 adolescence & 45 adults) out of which 45 were males and 45 females. The age range of the participants was 15-18 years for adolescence and 30-40 years for adults. The results indicated that the recall for self-referenced information was higher in contrast to semantic and structural processing.