Abstract
The self-choice effect states that self-selected items are more likely to be remembered than items selected by an experimenter. It has been suggested that the act of comparing among items in the self-choice condition is necessary for the self-choice effect to emerge (Itoh, Ayabe-Kanamura, & Kikuchi, 2012), but it is also possible that semantic characteristics accessed within the comparison process could facilitate memory (i.e., a levels-of-processing effect). During the incidental-study phase of our experiment, participants made comparisons of two words based on either semantic-level or non-semantic-level characteristics or made judgments about a single word at either a semantic-level or non-semantic-level. Recall performance showed a levels-of-processing effect for both conditions. More importantly, the performance results indicated a facilitating effect of making a comparison regardless of the level-of-processing. These results suggest that making comparisons between items during selection, rather than level-of-processing alone, contributes to the self-choice effect on memory.
