In addition to allowing for rapid processing of schema-relevant information,
self-schemas provide a framework for organizing and storing this information.Consequently, we would expect people to retrieve information from memory
more readily when they have a strong schema for a topic than when the
information is stored in a less organized manner. To test this hypothesis,
researchers presented college students with a series of 40 questions on a
computer screen (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). Participants answered each
question by pressing a YES or a NO button as quickly as possible. Thirty of thequestions were written so that people could answer easily without using their
self-schemas to process the information. For these questions, participants
simply answered whether a word was printed in big letters, whether it rhymedwith another word, or whether it meant the same thing as another word.
However, for 10 questions participants had to decide whether the word
described them. That is, they had to process the information through theirself-schemas.
What the participants were not told was that afterward they would be
asked to recall as many of the 40 words as possible. As shown in Figure 15.4,
when participants answered questions about themselves, they were more
likely to remember the information than when the question was processed
in other ways. The researchers point to this finding as evidence for a self-
schema. When asked whether a word describes them, participants processed
the question through their self-schemas. Because information in our self-
schemas is easy to access, the self-referent words were easier to remember
123Number of Words Recalled
Big
letters?Rhymes
with?Means
same as?Describes
you?
FIGURE 15.4 Mean Number of Words Recalled as a Function of
Cue Question
Source: From Rogers, et al. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology , 35, 677 –688. Reprinted by permission of the American Psychological
Association.Cognitive Representations of the Self 421