How “mere” is the mere ownership effect in memory? Evidence for semantic organization processes

•The mere ownership effect (MOE) is put in context of level-of-processing theories.•The MOE is confirmed for recognition and recollection and extended to free recall.•The MOE is found to be confined to semantically meaningful stimuli.•Semantic organization is a likely mechanism to underlie the MOE.•“Self” vs. “non-self” may function as organizing principle for to-be-learned material.

Memory is better for items arbitrarily assigned to the self than for items assigned to another person (mere ownership effect, MOE). In a series of six experiments, we investigated the role of semantic processes for the MOE. Following successful replication, we investigated whether the MOE was contingent upon semantic processing: For meaningless stimuli, there was no MOE. Testing for a potential role of semantic elaboration using meaningful stimuli in an encoding task without verbal labels, we found evidence of spontaneous semantic processing irrespective of self- or other-assignment. When semantic organization was manipulated, the MOE vanished if a semantic classification task was added to the self/other assignment but persisted for a perceptual classification task. Furthermore, we found greater clustering of self-assigned than of other-assigned items in free recall. Taken together, these results suggest that the MOE could be based on the organizational principle of a “me” versus “not-me” categorization.