‘It’s Mine!’Children’s memory bias for
self-owned items
Sheila Cunningham
David TurkNeil Macrae
Project funded by the European Research Council
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
Ownership
Why study ownership in children?
Owned objects are part of children’s self concept.
Self-development
Early patterns of self-development (Lewis, 1991): Neonatal: ‘implicit consciousness’ 18 months: ‘idea of me’ (self-recognition, use of
personal pronouns, ‘Mine!’) 3-4 years: show self-conscious emotions, an
awareness of others BUT egocentric processing still dominates.
By 10 years: abstract self construct
‘Self-memory effects’: better memory for self-relevant than other-relevant information
‘Self Reference Effect in memory’ (Rogers et al., 1977)
Trait recognition memory shows self-memory bias.
‘Are you creative?’
‘Is Brad Pitt modest?’
v.
The Self and cognition
Self reference effect
Underlying mechanisms:
self is well-organised and elaborate construct, leads to rich encoding
(Klein & Loftus, 1988. Symons & Johnston, 1997).
self-relevant cues lead to enhanced encoding (affect/attentional responses)
(Cunningham et al., 2008; Turk, et al., 2008)
Self reference effect
Difficult to apply standard paradigm to children, who lack reading ability and an abstract self construct.
Age at which SRE emerges currently unclear
e.g., 7 years (Pullyblank et al., 1982)
10 years (Halpin et al., 1984; Ray et al., 2009)
Children’s self-memory effects
Would children show self-memory effects?
Perhaps – young children are highly egocentric
…but do not have mature, elaborate self-concept.
Current study: using ownership to study self-memory effects.
Why?
young children have highly developed understanding of ownership and concrete objects (Furby, 1980)
Ownership elicits self-memory effects in adults (Cunningham et al., 2008)
Children’s self-memory effects
54 children (aged 4-6) were tested in pairs.
Children were then separated and given surprise recognition memory test.
In separate session, children completed the BPVS.
Children took turns to sort 56 picture cards into self-owned and other-owned baskets.
Ownership experiment
Memory data was transformed into A’ scores to account for different levels of response bias.
Analysis of memory data revealed significantly better memory for owned objects (F(1,53) = 8.08, p < .01).
Children grouped into four verbal age categories: 3-4 yrs (N=9) 5 yrs (N=17) 6 yrs (N=12) 7-8 yrs (N=18)
Results
Results
Ownership effect x Verbal age: (F(1,53) = 2.84, p < .05).
0.75
0.8
0.85
0.9
0.95
3-4 5 6 7-8
Verbal age (years)
Re
cog
niti
on
acc
ura
cy (
a')
Self owned itemsOther owned items
Conclusions: Ownership
Young children can show self memory effects.
What operations underlie the ownership effect?
e.g., affect and attention (implicit system)
elaboration by self-knowledge (explicit system)
How do these self systems change across development?
Ownership effect is especially large in children with VA of 3-4 years.
Changing ownership effect might be due to changes in: egocentrism encoding ability
Need additional data to check reliability of effect and answer these questions.
Conclusions: Verbal age
Thank you.