Evidence for the Self as a Cognitive Prototype: The "False Alarms Effect".

In a recognition memory study involving personal adjectives, the number of false alarms was found to increase with degree of self-reference of the adjectives. This was interpreted as: (1) evidence that the self is an important aspect of processing personal information, and (2) that the self functions as a cognitive prototype. The self can be seen to be a large and complex prototype that imparts a bias in processing personal information. This bias to perceive new, self-descriptive adjectives as being previously seen, has import for a theory of self and other-referent information processing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]