The Effects Of Ownership On Memory
An Investigation of the Effects of Ownership on Memory
A sense of self allows us to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings. Self-referential processing engages the cortical midline structures of the brain, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) (Kim & Johnson, 2012). Our sense of self can extend to include objects that are considered especially relevant and important; owned-objects fall into this category due to potential frequent contact. Ownership persuades us to perceive objects as more valuable (the endowment effect), and more desirable simply because we happen to own them (mere ownership effect). There is also memory advantage for information encoded with explicit reference to the self as opposed to those related to another …show more content…
A red and a blue shopping bag appeared on either side of the screen, each one belonging to the participant or the other person. The colour and location of the self-owned bag was counterbalanced across participants, and the bags stayed on screen at all times. Participants were instructed to allocate 50 items into each bag by pressing right or left arrow keys using their right hand. The coloured lines above and below each item indicated the appropriate bag. Items appeared alternately in randomised order, for 1500 ms then followed by coloured lines. Participants had to start moving the item within the next 2000 ms or it would disappear from screen. Once they started moving the item, it would stay on screen until fully inside a bag, then the coloured lines would disappear. There was a 500 ms pause between items. Surprise recognition memory test. The participants were presented with 150 items (100 old and 50 new), one at a time in randomised order. They had to indicate whether or not they recognised each item by pressing ‘O’ if they did and ‘P’ if they did not, within 1500 ms of an item’s appearance. A blank screen was displayed for 1000 ms between items. The experiment concluded with the participants reporting basic demographic information such as age, gender and …show more content…
This may result in them receiving less priority in cognitive processing, especially considering the fact that they appeared concurrently with self-owned items. Our brain employs selective attention to effectively process particular things at the expense of overlooking less relevant concurrences. Therefore, our results may simply reflect the lack of engagement and distinct encoding for mother-owned items when presented parallel to self-owned items. At best, it demonstrates that within self-relevant processing there exists distinctions based on
A sense of self allows us to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings. Self-referential processing engages the cortical midline structures of the brain, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) (Kim & Johnson, 2012). Our sense of self can extend to include objects that are considered especially relevant and important; owned-objects fall into this category due to potential frequent contact. Ownership persuades us to perceive objects as more valuable (the endowment effect), and more desirable simply because we happen to own them (mere ownership effect). There is also memory advantage for information encoded with explicit reference to the self as opposed to those related to another …show more content…
A red and a blue shopping bag appeared on either side of the screen, each one belonging to the participant or the other person. The colour and location of the self-owned bag was counterbalanced across participants, and the bags stayed on screen at all times. Participants were instructed to allocate 50 items into each bag by pressing right or left arrow keys using their right hand. The coloured lines above and below each item indicated the appropriate bag. Items appeared alternately in randomised order, for 1500 ms then followed by coloured lines. Participants had to start moving the item within the next 2000 ms or it would disappear from screen. Once they started moving the item, it would stay on screen until fully inside a bag, then the coloured lines would disappear. There was a 500 ms pause between items. Surprise recognition memory test. The participants were presented with 150 items (100 old and 50 new), one at a time in randomised order. They had to indicate whether or not they recognised each item by pressing ‘O’ if they did and ‘P’ if they did not, within 1500 ms of an item’s appearance. A blank screen was displayed for 1000 ms between items. The experiment concluded with the participants reporting basic demographic information such as age, gender and …show more content…
This may result in them receiving less priority in cognitive processing, especially considering the fact that they appeared concurrently with self-owned items. Our brain employs selective attention to effectively process particular things at the expense of overlooking less relevant concurrences. Therefore, our results may simply reflect the lack of engagement and distinct encoding for mother-owned items when presented parallel to self-owned items. At best, it demonstrates that within self-relevant processing there exists distinctions based on