Effects of self-construal priming on autobiographical memory and attentional processes

Abstract

Cross-cultural research on perception and attention has shown that Westerners and East Asians use different thinking styles. Studies on autobiographical memory have also demonstrated that culture affects memory content and accessibility. When both of these basic and higher level processes considered, tendency is observed to causally attribute cross-cultural differences to independent and interdependent self-construals. This thesis emerges from the studies having specifically revealed that priming different self-construals affected the response latencies of global or local letter identification and autobiographical memory recall. Via conducting two experiments, the aim of this thesis is to see how the findings will embody for Turkish university students who are considered to be centrally located on the self-construal dimension. In contrast to the above mentioned studies that are proposed to have small effect sizes, it is expected that priming different self-construals won’t affect attentional processes, yet suggestibility is expected for autobiographical memories that directly interact with the self-system. Both experiments indicated that self-construal priming did not lead to a difference in participants’ global or local letter identification latencies, yet it affected the memory recall process. Conducted experiments cumulatively showed that content and recall perspective of remembered memories depended on the type of selfconstrual prime. However, findings revealed qualitative differences for the two experiments.|Keywords : self-construal, priming, autobiographical memory, attention