Self-Referential Encoding

Self-referential encoding is a way of organizing information in memory by interpreting incoming information in relation to oneself, using one's own self-concept as a backdrop; examples include attributing personality traits to oneself or recognizing a recollected episode as a personal memory. Its implications appear across many psychological phenomena, including the cocktail party effect, in which people attend to their own name even amid other conversation or louder, more distracting noise, and the broader tendency to evaluate things connected to oneself, such as one's own initials, more positively than other things. The self-reference effect, the resulting boost to memory when information is related to the self during encoding, has been the most closely studied consequence of self-referential encoding.