Abstract
The goal of the present experiment was to investigate if an individual uses self-referent encoding and structural encoding which of the two encoded styles produces higher recall performance. The measure was based on recall performance of three groups: original related, original non-related, and new items. The results reported were conducted to evaluate ones way of individual processing and the effect of performance and also the words themselves on individual performance. Results demonstrated words related to the self regardless of level of processing produced high performance in the recognition task. Suggestions are discussed for further research and theory on self-referent encoding, and semantic memory. Key Words: college students, levels of processing, words, self-reference
Encoding Styles: Recognition performance on related vs. unrelated words
Levels of processing in memory, proposed first by Craik & Lockharts (1972) framework suggests that information is transferred easily to the long-term memory if it is considered, understood and related to previous memories to grow meaning than to be just practiced. The amount of consideration of information was given the term depth of processing, where the deeper the information is processed, the longer the memory sketch would last. They introduced three examples of levels which information could be processed; structural this is shallow processing, looking at what the composition of the word appears as, phonetic processing by the sound of the word and finally, semantic, deep processing, considering the meaning of the word. In line with past research (Craik & Lockart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975), Rogers et al. found that making a semantic judgment led to better recall than did making judgments about either surface or phonetic features. Judging a word in relation to self, however, produced the best recall of