Klein S B, Kihlstrom J F
J Exp Psychol Gen. 1986 Mar;115(1):26-38. doi: 10.1037//0096-3445.115.1.26.
Relating information to the self (self-referent encoding) has been shown to produce better recall than purely semantic encoding. This finding has been interpreted as demonstrating that self-reference produces a more elaborate memory trace than semantic encoding, and it has been cited frequently as evidence that the self is one of the most highly elaborated structures in memory. The experiments reported in this article challenge this interpretation of the self-reference effect by demonstrating that self-referent and semantic encodings produce virtually identical free recall levels if they are first equated for the amount of organization they encourage. On the basis of our findings we conclude the following: Organization, not elaboration, is responsible for the superior recall performance obtained when information is encoded self-referentially, and organization is not a necessary component of self-referent encoding and can be orthogonally varied within self-referent and semantic encoding tasks. Finally, we discuss how a single-factor theory based on organization can account for many of the self-referent recall findings reported in the literature.
将信息与自我关联（自我参照编码）已被证明比单纯的语义编码能产生更好的记忆效果。这一发现被解释为表明自我参照比语义编码产生更精细的记忆痕迹，并且它经常被引为证据，证明自我是记忆中最精细的结构之一。本文所报告的实验对这种自我参照效应的解释提出了挑战，通过证明如果自我参照编码和语义编码在它们所促进的组织量上首先达到等同，那么它们产生的自由回忆水平实际上是相同的。基于我们的研究结果，我们得出以下结论：组织而非精细度，才是信息进行自我参照编码时获得更好回忆表现的原因，并且组织并非自我参照编码的必要组成部分，它可以在自我参照和语义编码任务中独立变化。最后，我们讨论基于组织的单因素理论如何能够解释文献中报道的许多自我参照回忆结果。
