We Are Particularly Good at Retrieving People Named Like Us

Frontiers in Psycology

A Self-Reference Effect on Memory for People: We Are Particularly Good at Retrieving People Named Like Us

by Prof. Serge Brédart*

• Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Research Unit, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

Keywords: memory, self, autobiographical memory, personal memory, memory bias

 

In the present study, it was evaluated whether one’s own name may produce a self-reference bias in memory for people. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that, in a verbal fluency task, participants recalled a greater number of known (familiar or famous) people with the same first name as their own than did paired participants, and vice versa. In the first experiment, paired participants knew each other but were not close. Experiment 2 examined whether this self-reference effect would still occur when the comparison target was a close other. This experiment showed that such a self-reference bias also occurred even when the paired persons were close (partners or very good friends). Overall the present paper describes a new naturalistic case of the self-reference effect.

Read on Frontiers in Psychology

The Psycholinguistics of Proper Name Comprehension

Using a Voice to Put a Name to a Face: The Psycholinguistics of Proper Name Comprehension

https://pubget.com/paper/23398179/Using_a_Voice_to_Put_a_Name_to_a_Face__The_Psycholinguistics_of_Proper_Name_Comprehension 

by Dale J Barr (Senior Lecturer, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow)

Laura Jackson and Isobel Phillips

in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2013),

PMID 23398179

We propose that hearing a proper name (e.g., Kevin) in a particular voice serves as a compound memory cue that directly activates representations of a mutually known target person, often permitting reference resolution without any complex computation of shared knowledge. In a referential communication study, pairs of friends played a communication game, in which we monitored the eyes of one friend (the addressee) while he or she sought to identify the target person, in a set of four photos, on the basis of a name spoken aloud. When the name was spoken by a friend, addressees rapidly identified the target person, and this facilitation was independent of whether the friend was articulating a message he or she had designed versus one from a third party with whom the target person was not shared. Our findings suggest that the comprehension system takes advantage of regularities in the environment to minimize effortful computation about who knows what.

(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

DOI: 10.1037/a0031813 

text of preprint's manuscript: http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/docs/download.php?type=PUBLS&id=2385