Brief ReportYours or mine? Ownership and memory
Introduction
“A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account”.
(James, 1890, p.291)
The ‘self’ is a dauntingly complex construct, but consideration of its ecological purpose suggests some very rudimentary functions. In particular, a ‘minimal’ sense of self (Gallagher, 2000) has been proposed that serves to distinguish an organism from its immediate external environment (Boyer et al., 2005, Gallagher, 2000, Humphrey, 2000, Neisser, 1988). As people interact with the environment, this minimal self is central to the experience of owning a body that produces actions and processes external stimuli. The concept of self can also be extended beyond the body, however, to incorporate aspects of the environment or experiences that are relevant to self (Belk, 1991). Indeed, the early development of strong self-object associations (manifested in the perpetual “Mine!” cry of young toddlers—see Fasig, 2000, Ross, 1996) speaks to the importance of ownership in cognition. The continual interaction between self and objects means that an important psychological function of the self may be to parse external stimuli into those items that are important for self to remember and those that can be treated lightly and processed less elaborately (see Tooby & Cosmides, 1995). The purpose of the present study was to investigate this proposed function by examining whether self-relevant objects are afforded a memory advantage.
The importance of self-relevance in item encoding is demonstrated by the ‘self-reference effect’ (SRE) in memory (Rogers et al., 1977, Symons and Johnson, 1997), the finding that information explicitly processed with reference to self (e.g., responding to the question “are you creative?”) enjoys a memory advantage over material encoded in relation to another person (e.g., responding to the question “is George Bush modest?”). The SRE has been attributed to the particularly accessible and elaborate nature of the self-construct, which enriches representations, improving both item recognition and source memory performance (see Johnson et al., 1993, Klein and Loftus, 1988, Mather et al., 2003, Mitchell and Johnson, 2000, Symons and Johnson, 1997). Although self-memory research to date has focused almost exclusively on trait encoding (see Symons & Johnson, 1997), we suspect that a memory advantage may also arise when self forms associations with objects that have been identified as self-relevant through less explicit means. If operating, of course, such an effect gives rise to an important question. How is self-relevance ascribed to stimuli?
In everyday life, the self is involved with objects in at least two important ways. The self can act on objects (e.g., “I pick up the apple”) and can form a psychological association with objects through ownership (e.g., “the apple is mine”). There is extant evidence to suggest that ownership in particular exerts a significant impact on cognition, although its effects on memory have not yet been explored. Owned objects are believed to enjoy a special processing status (Beggan, 1992) with such a strong association forming between self and owned objects that they are treated as psychological extensions of self and their perception is warped by pervasive self-protecting biases (Belk, 1988, Belk, 1991). This pattern is most clearly demonstrated by the ‘mere ownership’ effect, the tendency for objects arbitrarily assigned to self (i.e., owned but not chosen by self) to be imbued with more positive characteristics (Beggan, 1992, Belk, 1988, Belk, 1991) and to be perceived as more valuable (the endowment effect—Kahneman et al., 1991, Knetsch and Sinden, 1984) than identical items not assigned to self. Given these pervasive influences of ownership on cognition, its impact could be predicted to extend beyond evaluative processing to the encoding and storage of owned-object representations in memory. Thus, the first objective of the present study will be to explore the possibility that owned objects are afforded an advantage in memory.
Of course, to own an object one must first come in contact with the item in question. What, then, are the cognitive consequences of acting on (i.e., reaching out and making contact with) objects? Although there is an extensive literature detailing the memorability of self-produced actions (for review, see Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005), whether this effect extends to the product of the action (i.e., the object with which contact is made) is unknown. There is a clear ecological value of monitoring physical contact with the external environment (Boyer et al., 2005), and memory representations should be enhanced by the profusion of afferent and efferent signals elicited by reaching out and making contact with objects (see Blakemore et al., 1998, Blakemore and Frith, 2003, Farrer and Frith, 2002). Together, these qualities raise the possibility that acting on objects may enhance subsequent memory performance. As well as examining the memorial impact of self-object associations formed through ownership, the current study will also investigate the effect of self-object contact on memory performance.
To investigate these issues, we designed a shopping experiment in which participants owned and acted on external objects. Participants each moved stimulus items, placing half of the items in a basket owned by self and half in a basket owned by another participant. Memory for the items in the baskets was then assessed.
Section snippets
Participants and design
Thirty undergraduate psychology students (27 female, mean age 20 years) took part in the experiment in return for partial course credits. The research was conducted in accordance with the guidelines and approval of the University of Aberdeen’s Psychology Ethics Committee. The experiment had a 2 (Ownership: self-owned or other-owned) × 2 (Action: self-moved or other-moved) repeated-measures design.
Procedure and stimulus materials
Participants entered the laboratory with a confederate posing as a second participant. They were both invited to sit at a table on which a red and a blue shopping basket were placed side by side. The experimenter sat at the other side of the table and told the pair of participants that each owned the basket nearest to them. Participants were asked to imagine that they had each won a basket of shopping items, represented in the experiment by picture cards. Their task was to sort cards marked
Results
Each participant’s recognition score was corrected for baseline false alarm rate by subtracting the proportion of ‘Old’ responses to foils from the proportion of ‘Old’ responses to previously presented items (see Fig. 1, upper panel). Overall, false alarms comprised 7.2% of participants’ responses to foils. Participants’ corrected scores were submitted to a 2 (Ownership: self-owned or other-owned) × 2 (Action: self-moved or other-moved) repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). The analysis
Discussion
The current experiment manipulated self-object associations formed through ownership and action, investigating the effects of these factors on recognition memory. It was found that ownership had a significant impact on memory performance, with participants correctly recognising more of the items consigned to their own basket than those in another’s basket. Participants also recognised self-owned items more quickly than those that were other-owned, suggesting that ownership elicits a strong
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