‘Know yourself’ to invoke memories

Our ability to remember informs our sense of self, according to new international research.

A study published in the Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, provides new evidence that the relationship may also work the other way around – invoking our sense of self can influence what we are able to remember.

Research has shown that self-imagination – imagining something from a personal perspective – can be an effective strategy for helping us to recognise something we have seen before, or retrieve specific information on cue.

These effects have reportedly been demonstrated in both healthy adults and individuals who suffer memory impairments as a result of brain injury or dementia.

These findings, according to researchers, suggest self imagination is a promising strategy for memory rehabilitation.

Psychological scientists, Matthew Grilli and Elizabeth Glisky, of the University of Arizona, decided to put self imagination to the test.

They wanted to compare self imagination to more traditional strategies that involve sense of self in order to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms that might be at work.

The researchers recruited 15 patients with acquired brain injury who had impaired memory and 15 healthy participants with normal memory to take part in the study.

Over the course of the study, the participants were asked to memorise five lists of 24 adjectives that described personality traits. As they were presented with each personality trait, the participants were instructed to employ one of five strategies: think of a word that rhymes with the trait (baseline), think of a definition for the trait (semantic elaboration), think about how the trait describes them (semantic self referential processing), think of a time when they acted out the trait (episodic self referential processing), or imagine acting out the trait (self imagining).

For all participants, healthy and memory impaired, self imagination boosted free recall of the personality traits more than any of the other strategies did.

The results supported the researchers’ hypothesis that the benefit of self imagination for memory impaired patients might be related to their ability to retrieve knowledge regarding their own personality traits, identity roles, and lifetime periods.

“Based on the results of our laboratory research, it might be possible to adapt self imagination to help patients with memory problems remember information encountered in everyday life, such as what they read in a book or heard on the news,” Mr Grilli said.

He added an important future step would be to investigate how to most effectively apply self imagination in a rehabilitation program to make a meaningful impact on the lives of people with memory impairment.