Hippocampal activity is associated with self‐descriptiveness effect in memory, whereas self‐reference effect in memory depends on medial prefrontal activity

The self has long been regarded as a unique cognitive structure by virtue of its superior mnemonic abilities. Two separate effects result from this self memory facilitation: self‐reference effect and self‐descriptiveness effect in memory. Self‐reference effect denotes that information processed with reference to the self is better remembered than information processed with reference to others, whereas self‐descriptiveness effect indicates that items judged to be self‐relevant is remembered better than items judged not to be relevant to self during self‐reference task. Although there is a compelling connection between self‐reference effect in memory and self mentalization processes indexed by the medial prefrontal activity, the underlying mechanisms of the self‐descriptiveness effect in memory have remained underspecified. In the present fMRI study, we used a subsequent memory paradigm to examine the neural correlates of self‐descriptiveness and self‐reference effect in memory. Participants encoded personality traits while performing self‐reference and other‐reference task (judged the descriptiveness of the traits to themselves or a famous person “Bruce Lee”), and then were given a test of recognition memory outside the scanner. It is revealed that the hippocampal activity corresponded with self‐descriptiveness effect in memory, but the activity of the medial prefrontal cortex and perirhinal cortex related to self‐reference effect in memory. These findings suggested that the memory boost for self‐relevant items relies on the enhanced relational binding mechanisms employed during self‐relevant items. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc.