In a study by Craik and Tulving, participants were shown a list of words. For each word they answered one of three questions: a question about whether the word was in capital letters (structural), a question about whether it rhymed with another word (phonemic), or a question about whether it fit a sentence (semantic). On a surprise recall test afterward, words processed semantically were remembered far better than those processed at the other two levels.
A separate variation showed that words processed in relation to oneself (e.g., "Does this word describe you?") were recalled even better than other semantic conditions. This is known as:
- A
Proactive interference
- B
The mere exposure effect
- C
The misinformation effect
- Dcheck_circle
The self-reference effect
Explanation
The self-reference effect is the tendency to better remember information that is related to oneself, likely because self-related processing is the deepest and most elaborative form of semantic encoding.