Abstract
Subjects made decisions about facial photographs and were tested later for recognition memory of the pictures. The study decisions involved judgments about abstract personality traits (e.g., friendliness) or physical features (e.g., lip thickness) relative to either self-comparisons or some nonself standard. The expected abstract-physical feature difference emerged, but there was no evidence for a self-other difference for either type of feature. A molar self-reference task specifying no particular attribute produced good performance, but no better than the abstract-nonself task or intent-to-learn instructions. For the molar-self task, faces judged to be similar to one’s own were easier to recognize than were dissimilar faces. The self-comparison task yields good retention with face stimuli, but apparently no better than other tasks that require examining many features during encoding.
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References Note au1._Mueller, J. H., & Courtois, M. R. Self-other comparisons in face memory. Unpublished manuscript, 1980
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The authors would like to acknowledge helpful comments on an earlier draft by Richard Petty and Donald Kausler. This research was supported by funds from the Research Council of the Graduate School of the University of Missouri.
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Mueller, J.H., Courtois, M.R. & Bailis, K.L. Self-reference in facial recognition. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 17, 85–88 (1981). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333675
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333675