Sunday, November 11, 2012

Imagining things

People store and retrieve information based on self-interest, feelings and mirroring – or mentally simulating an activity. Kind of like watching a tennis match in preparation for a game. When presented with lists of character traits (adventurous, brave, compassionate) participants were asked one of five questions: 
1. what does it rhyme with (phonetic elaboration) 
2. what does it mean (semantic elaboration) 
3. can you identify with it (semantic self-referential processing) 
4. have you ever acted that way (episodic self-referential processing) 
5. can you imagine yourself acting that way now (self-imagining) 
Turns out question 5 (self-imagining) boosts recall more than any of the other questions [ link ].

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