Minimal ownership: cognitive effects and underlying mechanisms

Mirjam van den BosUniversity of Aberdeen, UK

What is ‘self’?

• We all know what it is, but it’s hard to define.

• ....what is ‘time’?

• “…in order to remain who you are from minute to minute, day to day, and year to year, your brain must somehow retain the essence of who you are over time. In the end then, the self is essentially a memory, or more accurately, a set of memories.” Joseph LeDoux (2003)

Self and Memory

• Does this trait describe you?

Self and Memory

• Does this trait describe you? intelligent

Self and Memory

• Does this trait describe you? intelligent

• Does this trait describe Person X?

Self and Memory

• Does this trait describe you? intelligent

• Does this trait describe Person X? reliable

Self and Memory

• Does this trait describe you? intelligent

• Does this trait describe Person X? reliable

• Memory advantage for information linked to self

Self Reference Effect (SRE)

• How can it be explained:

• - self as superordinate schema (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977)

- ‘any well-differentiated person will do’ (Bower & Gilligan, 1979)

- level of processing effect (Ferguson, Rule, & Carlson, 1983)

- organization (Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986; Symons & Johnson, 1997)

• Current view: self is special (e.g., Turk, Cunningham, & Macrae, 2008)

Creating self-effects with other methods

• Objects owned by self

• James (1890):

“A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not

only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes

and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and

friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses,

and yacht and bank-account’’.

• Objects used to define, extend or compensate self (Belk, 1988; Beggan, 1991)

• Self-serving bias (James, 1890)

• Owned objects more favourable (Beggan, 1992)

‘You are what you own’

Shopping paradigm (Cunningham, Turk, Macdonald, & Macrae, 2008)

Stimuli: 216 items

• 72 self-owned targets

• 72 other-owned targets

• 72 distractors

• 2 (ownership) x 2 (action) design

• Baskets not always practical (e.g., in MRI scanner)

• Items always are presented with colour cue

• Is engaging with objects important for the memory effect?

Shopping Paradigm (2)(Van den Bos, Cunningham, Conway, & Turk, in press)

• Stimuli: 150 images:

- 50 self-owned targets

- 50 other-owned targets

- 50 distractors at test

• Single-factor (Ownership) within-subjects design

Results

Ownership: F(1,27) = 6.389, MSe = 0.003, p = .018

0.5

0.55

0.6

0.65

0.7

0.75

0.8

0.85

0.9

Ownership

Hit

Rat

eSelf

Other

• Spontaneous elaboration

• Arousal (e.g., Williams, Diehl, & Mahoney, 2002)

• Attention (e.g., Bredart, Delchambre, & Laureys, 2006)

• Ecological function (e.g., Ingold & Gibson, 1993; Nairne, 2005)

Conclusions

Thank you!

Beggan, J. K. (1991). Using what you own to get what you need: The role of possessions in satisfying control motivation. [Special Issue]. Journal of Social Behavior and

Personality, 6, 129-146.

Beggan, J. K. (1992). On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 229-237.

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 139-168.

Van den Bos, M., Cunningham, S. J., Conway, M. A., & Turk, D. J. (in press). Mine to remember: The impact of ownership on recollective experience. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Bower, G. H., & Gilligan, S. G. (1979). Remembering information related to one's self. Journal of Research in Personality, 13, 420-432.

Bredart, S., Delchambre, M., & Laureys, S. (2006). One’s own face is hard to ignore.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59,46–52.

Cunningham, S. J., Turk, D. J., MacDonald, L. M., & Macrae, C. N. (2008). Yours or Mine? Ownership and memory. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 312–318.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology, Vol 1. New York: Holt.

References

(references)

Ferguson, T. J., Rule, G. R., & Carlson, D. ( 1983 ). Memory for personally relevant information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 251-261.

Ingold, T. & Gibson, K. R. (1993). Tools, language and cognition in human evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Klein, S. B., & Kihlstrom, J. E (1986). Elaboration, organization, and the self-reference effect in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115, 26-38.

LeDoux, J. (2003). The emotional brain, fear and the amygdala. Cellular and molecular Neurobiology, 23, 227-238.

Nairne, J. S. (2005). The functionalist agenda in memory research. In A. F. Healy (Ed.), Experimental cognitive psychology and its applications: Festschrift in honor of Lyle Bourne, Walter Kintsch, and Thomas Landauer. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N.A., & Kirker, W.S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 677-688.

Symons, C. S., & Johnson, B. T. (1997). The self-reference effect in memory: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 371–394.

Williams, A. M., Diehl, N. S., & Mahoney, M. J. (2002). Mirror time: Empirical findings and implications for a constructivist psychotherapeutic technique. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 15, 21–39.

Raw data Van den Bos et al. (in press)

Means and Standard Deviations of Overall Recognition, Remember Hit Rate (HTR) and Know HTR, by Ownership Conditions.

XXXX Ownership

Self Other

Overall HTR X

SD

.781

.209

.746

.192

Remember HTR X

SD

.561

.221

.479

.235

Know HTR X

SD

.178

.128

.218

.178

Guess HTR X

SD

.042

.066

.050

.060

(Raw data Van den Bos et al., in press)

Means and Standard Deviations of Remember, Know and Guess False-Alarm Rates.

X

False-Alarm rates

Remember Know Guess

X

SD

.009

.018

.042

.064

.026

.040