SELF-IMAGINATION ‘COULD BOOST MEMORY POWER’

SELF-IMAGINATION ‘COULD BOOST MEMORY POWER’

    Self-imagination — imagining something from a personal perspective — can be an effective strategy for helping us recognise something we’ve seen before, a study has shown. These beneficial effects have been demonstrated for both healthy adults and for individuals who suffer memory impairments as a result of brain injury.
    These findings suggest that self-imagination is a promising strategy for memory rehabilitation.
    But no study has investigated the effect of self-imagination on what is perhaps the most difficult, and most relevant, type of memory: free recall.
    Psychological scientists Matthew Grilli and Elizabeth Glisky of the University of Arizona decided to put self-imagination to the test. They wanted to compare selfimagination to more traditional strategies that involve sense of self in order to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms that might be at work.
    The researchers recruited 15 patients with acquired brain injury who had impaired memory and 15 healthy participants with normal memory, to take part in the study. Over the course of the study, the participants were asked to memorise five lists of 24 adjectives that described personality traits. As they were presented with each personality trait, the participants were instructed to employ one of the five strategies: think of a word that rhymes with the trait (baseline), think of a definition for the trait (semantic elaboration), think about how the trait describes them (semantic self-referential processing), think of a time when they acted out the trait (episodic self-referential processing), or imagine acting out the trait (self-imagining).
    For all participants, healthy and memory-impaired, self-imagination boosted free recall of the personality traits more than any of the other strategies did. Comparing the more traditional self-referential strategies, the researchers found that the participants with memory impairments were better able to remember a word if they were asked to think about how well it described them (semantic) than if they were asked to think about a time when they acted out the personality trait (episodic).