Abstract
Self-chosen items are more likely to be remembered than items assigned by an experimenter (the self-choice effect). In the self-choice condition, during comparison of items, similarities and differences of items seem to be processed (distinctive processing), in order to choose one item. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the self-choice effect was explained by distinctive processing of items. We assumed that it would become difficult to process items distinctively, when semantically associated words were compared repeatedly in successive self-choice trials by a common criterion. In our experiment, we asked participants to choose one from a pair of words repeatedly within the same category, and we controlled the proportion of self-choice trials in the choice phase. The results showed that the self-choice effect in cued recall disappeared when the self-choice trials appeared more often in the choice phase, consistent with the prediction from the distinctive processing account.
