Project funded by the European Research Council

1. ‘It’s Mine!’Children’s memory bias for self-owned itemsSheila CunninghamDavid TurkNeil Macrae Project funded by the European Research Council UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

2. Ownership • Why study ownership in children? • Owned objects are part of children’s self concept.

3. 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

4. ‘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. The Self and cognition ‘Are you creative?’ v. ‘Is Brad Pitt modest?’

5. 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)

6. 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)

7. Would children show self-memory effects? Children’s self-memory effects Perhaps – young children are highly egocentric …but do not have mature, elaborate self-concept.

8. Children’s self-memory effects • 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)

9. 54 children (aged 4-6) were tested in pairs. Ownership experiment • Children took turns to sort 56 picture cards into self-owned and other-owned baskets. • Children were then separated and given surprise recognition memory test. • In separate session, children completed the BPVS.

10. Results • 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)

11. Results Ownership effect x Verbal age: (F(1,53) = 2.84, p < .05).

12. 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?

13. Conclusions: Verbal age • 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.

14. Thank you.