Wang Jianqin, Otgaar Henry, Howe Mark L, Zhou Chu
Department of Clinical Psychological Science, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200, MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
City, University of London, London, UK.
Mem Cognit. 2019 Jan;47(1):76-86. doi: 10.3758/s13421-018-0851-3.
It is well established that processing information in relation to oneself (i.e., self-referencing) leads to better memory for that information than processing that same information in relation to others (i.e., other-referencing). However, it is unknown whether self-referencing also leads to more false memories than other-referencing does. In the current two experiments with European and East Asian samples, we presented participants the Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists together with their own name or other people's name (i.e., "Trump" in Experiment 1 and "Li Ming" in Experiment 2). We found consistent results across the two experiments; that is, in the self-reference condition, participants had higher true and false memory rates compared with those in the other-reference condition. Moreover, we found that self-referencing did not exhibit superior mnemonic advantage in terms of net accuracy compared with other-referencing and neutral conditions. These findings are discussed in terms of theoretical frameworks such as spreading activation theories and the fuzzy-trace theory. We propose that our results reflect the adaptive nature of memory in the sense that cognitive processes that increase mnemonic efficiency may also increase susceptibility to associative false memories.
与处理与他人相关的相同信息（即他人参照）相比，处理与自己相关的信息（即自我参照）能带来更好的记忆，这一点已得到充分证实。然而，自我参照是否也会比他人参照导致更多的错误记忆尚不清楚。在当前针对欧洲和东亚样本的两项实验中，我们向参与者呈现了迪斯-罗迪格-麦克德莫特列表，并附上他们自己的名字或其他人的名字（即实验1中的“特朗普”和实验2中的“李明”）。我们在两项实验中得到了一致的结果；也就是说，在自我参照条件下，与他人参照条件下的参与者相比，参与者的正确和错误记忆率更高。此外，我们发现，与他人参照和中性条件相比，自我参照在净准确性方面并未表现出优越的记忆优势。我们依据扩散激活理论和模糊痕迹理论等理论框架对这些发现进行了讨论。我们提出，我们的结果反映了记忆的适应性本质，即提高记忆效率的认知过程可能也会增加对关联性错误记忆的易感性。
