Happy Birthday?!

The next couple posts get a little more technical to show a comparison of a study done by psychologists and how it was replicated for learning purposes in the classroom. This is a cognitive psychology lab short paper (minus the graphs) that I completed.

“The purpose of the Kesebir and Oishi study was to show how the self-reference effect relates to remembering peoples birthdays. They hypothesized that because birthdays are very close to the self, participants would be most likely to remember birthdays that are close to the participants. The self-reference effect is when memories are processed with relation to the self and are better remembered. Using birthdays that are personal to the individual participant allowed for the investigation of a naturalistic case of the self reference effect occurring outside of the laboratory. For the “Happy Birthday” cog-lab Kesebir and Oishi’s first study was replicated in an Educational Psychology course and the second study was replicated in our Cognitive Psychology course.


Study 1 as conducted by Kesebir and Oishi had students in an online study free recall the birthdays of up to 10 friends only if they could be reasonably sure of the date. After entering their friends’ birthdays, they were then instructed on a new screen to enter their own birthday. The experimenters ensured that participants were not explicitly primed by asking for the participants’ birthday after they had already given the dates of their friends’ birthdays. Study 1 as conducted in the Educational Psychology Course had students to list up to 10 friends that they knew the exact birthday of. They were also instructed to list their birthday. Papers were then collected to be recorded by the instructor.


These studies are similar in the basic instructions and the results; see Figure 1. In every category the results are very similar such as females remembering more birthdays than males, which the article suggests is because females are more often concerned with interpersonal relationships, and that males remember birthdays closer to theirs more than females showing a stronger self-reference effect. Both studies suggest significance in the self-reference affect to remembering birthdays closer to one’s own.” One difference between the studies is that one was online based while the other was in class.”

To be continued....