Keiji Okada

This study examined the explanation that evaluative judgment facilitates memory in self-reference and social reference (Ferguson, Rule, & Carson, 1983). In Experiment 1, effects of a personal like-dislike rating task and a social-preference rating task on free recall were compared. The result showed that performance of two conditions were the same. This result supported Ferguson et al. (1983). In Experiment 2, subjects rated same word in two different tasks. Most correlation coefficients of rating values of two different tasks were low. In Experiment 3, the task facilitation paradigm (Klein, Loftus, & Burton, 1989) was used. Subjects were given two tasks in one succession. When same tasks were repeated, subjects judged faster than when different tasks executed. These results of Experiment 2 and 3 suggested that object of reference in the like-dislike rating task differed from that in the social-preference rating task. The results of three experiments implied that evaluative aspects of self and social criterion effect memory facilitation.

The main purpose of the present study was to examine the condition for the self-reference effect to appear in implicit memory. A like-dislike rating task was used as self-reference orienting task. In Experiment 1, a general knowledge task was used as implicit memory task. Cues in this task included category names. The results of Experiment 1 did not show the self-reference effect. In Experiment 2, a category exemplar generation task was used as implicit memory task. Materials for memory experiments consisted of high-frequency nouns as examples of some categories. The results did not show the self-reference effect. In Experiment 3, the category exemplar generation task was used as implicit memory task. Materials for memory experiments consisted of low-frequency nouns as examples of some categories. The results of Experiment 3 showed the self-reference effect. The results of these experiments showed that the like-dislike rating task has functions of organizing materials powerfully, and of producing the self-reference effect in implicit memory as measured with category exemplar generation task.