What is self-reference effect in psychology?

The self-reference effect is the tendency for individuals to have better memory for information that relates to oneself in comparison to material that has less personal relevance. The self-reference effect was first proposed by Rogers, Kuiper and Kirker (1977) in a study expanding the classic depth-of-processing work by Craik and Tulving (1975). In order to understand the mechanisms underlying self-referent encoding, it is important to first review the depth-of-processing model.