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and concrete statements A rudimentary analysis of the qualities of the self-concept generated compared abstract and concrete statements. Echoing the findings of Kuhn and McPartland (1954), 80% of participants’ first selfconcepts were concrete (e.g. I am a singer; I am a daughter). There were no significant differences in fluency or personal importance based on concrete/abstract analysis (p > .4). Discussion This study set out with the aim of investigating how memories in the self-memory system become accessible with reference to self-concepts (SMS; Conway, 2005). First, results showed that personal significance was significantly higher for earlier generated self-concepts. Most importantly, the novel prediction was that for self-concepts generated earlier in the list, there should be a greater number of more accessible autobiographical memories. Indeed, people were able to generate significantly more memories for self-concepts in the first serial position. Thus it is proposed that personal significance of a self-concept and the accessibility of autobiographical memories are related, as indicated in the serial position of the IAM cues generated, and as predicted by the SMS model (Conway, 2005). Rathbone, C.J., & Moulin, C.J.A. (in press). Measuring autobiographical fluency in the selfmemory system. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 9 This is consistent with the idea that either the SMS operates to raise the accessibility of memories that are more significant and important to the self, or that self-concepts are generated to make sense of or organize memories of events held in the SMS. Either way, more accessible memories are associated with more significant selves. In Conway's original model, there is much emphasis on goals – the SMS is a dynamic system which reacts to an individual’s current goals. The SMS predicts that core selfidentity is closely related to current goals and research has shown that autobiographical knowledge related to current goals of the self is more accessible than autobiographical knowledge that is unrelated to current goals (Moberly & MacLeod, 2006). In this task, the goal was to provide a description of the self using “I am” statements. Arguably, in constructing these statements, the working self activated memories and self-concepts which were in keeping with this goal. The nature of the SMS is exposed in the fact that, when participants were asked to generate these “I am” statements, they did not have the goal of generating autobiographical memories. Nonetheless, when the “I am” cues were later used as cues to generate memories, results showed that the accessibility of memories was higher for the first concepts that came to mind in the IAM task. Thus, these data support the idea that the working self acts to provide an online, up-to-date description of the self, which is in turn related to sets of accessible memories in the autobiographical memory base. At the very least, the data suggest that when asking the question “Who am I?” the answers generated relate to sets of memories which can be more readily accessed the more salient the identity is. It is proposed that the SMS acts like a hierarchical organizational structure, which is overseen by executive processes which operate to activate and suppress the relationships between events and selfconcepts. These data can be compared with the fluency literature on other tasks. Fluency tasks (such as “generate as many animals as you can in the next minute”) are typically seen as measures of executive function (e.g. Benton, 1968). They measure the capacity to generate a search and retrieve Rathbone, C.J., & Moulin, C.J.A. (in press). Measuring autobiographical fluency in the selfmemory system. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 10 information from an information hierarchy. In neuropsychological groups verbal fluency correlates with the ability to generate autobiographical memories (Greene, Hodges and Baddeley, 1995). In their study, Greene et al, documented the expected deficit in retrieval of autobiographical memory in Alzheimer's disease using a fluency task similar to the one used here. They also found that this deficit was related to executive function more generally, but in particular, verbal fluency as measured by initial letter verbal fluency. They propose that, as well as there being aspects of autobiographical memory which rely on the intact storage of personal information and experiences, proficient retrieval of autobiographical memories relies on setting up search parameters and carrying out verifications, much like the strategy used to carry out any other fluency task: "Executive impairment may lead to a poorer search and recollection process, and hence impaired retrieval of autobiographical memories" (Greene et al., 1995; p.1666). It is suggested that each element of the conceptual self in the SMS acts like a personal semantic category. Participants use each self-concept to cue incidents and experiences which are relevant to that cue. This is apparently easiest for self-concepts which first come to mind. The fluency literature indicates that more well specified categories are easier to generate from (e.g., pre-existing categories such as ‘furniture’ compared to ad-hoc categories such as 'things to take on a camping trip’). Moreover, larger categories and semantic, rather than phonetic, categories lead to higher levels of fluency (e.g. Diaz et al., 2004). It is possible to make inferences about self-concepts on this basis: personally significant self-concepts may be broader and cue more memories according to their size, and their inherent structure. For example, semantic category fluency tests (e.g. naming animals) yield higher levels of performance than letter-based fluency tests (e.g. Diaz et al., 2004; Riva, Nichelli, & Devoti, 2000). This difference is typically explained by differences in hierarchical organization between letters and semantic types. Retrieval by letters requires exploration of more subsets of categories than the retrieval of names of a specified semantic category (Riva et al., 2000). Even so, set sizes can be observed the more exemplars that are available, the more you can generate (Diaz et al., 2004). Certainly, research on the SRE shows that the self organizes episodic memories. A selfconcept which cues fewer memories is one where the participant needs to explore associated ideas Rathbone, C.J., & Moulin, C.J.A. (in press). Measuring autobiographical fluency in the selfmemory system. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 11 and generate subordinate search cues. Again, this might allow some predictions about the value of different types of self-concepts cueing autobiographical memories. Future studies should examine how various self-concepts can be construed as semantic categories and to what extent they cue memories. But note that no differences were found according to whether the self-concepts were abstract or concrete. Also, participants were required to generate statements that reflected ‘stable and enduring’ aspects of their sense of self, and as a result, the self-concepts were all rather personally significant the lowest mean rating being 6.5 out of ten. Thus to use a comparison of self-concepts which either are or are not endorsed as characterizing the individual may further expose the nature of self-concepts as cues to autobiographical remembering. A possible limitation of this study was that length of memory descriptions and ability to fill the two minute period were not recorded, nor were ratings of memory vividness or level of detail collected. These factors should be included in future tasks based on this fluency paradigm as they would further elucidate the self-memory relationship. One further possibility is that the narrowness/breadth of selfconcepts had an effect on memory fluency, with broader self-concepts cueing a wider range of memories. However, whilst category broadness, or size, has clear effects in other fluency tasks (e.g. ‘animals’ cues more exemplars than ‘vegetables’; Diaz et al., 2004), the predictions are less clear-cut when considering the impact of self-concept broadness on memory fluency. Thus, a self that is broad (in terms of spatial, temporal and social context) may be associated with a wider range of possible events, but in fact cue fewer autobiographical memories. For example, the self-concept ‘friendly’ is arguably a broad category of the self (in that it could apply across a range of social, spatial and temporal contexts) but may not be particularly personally significant and thus may not cue many autobiographical memories. On the other-hand, a very narrow self-concept (e.g. ‘I am someone who finds it hard to revise for exams’) might cue a higher number of autobiographical memories – if this Rathbone, C.J., & Moulin, C.J.A. (in press). Measuring autobiographical fluency in the selfmemory system. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 12 self-concept is particularly significant for that participant. Self-concepts are idiosyncratic, and thus identifying oneself as, for example, a ‘student’ may be more important for some participants than others. Supporting this idea, there was variation in the ranking of identical statements. For example, three participants generated ‘I am a sister’ as their first statement, and two generated this as their tenth statement.Finally, Conway (2005) posits a bidirectional link between self and memory. In this experiment the relationship was examined in one direction (more active self-concepts lead to more active memories), but it is still difficult to resolve whether memories cue self-concepts, self-concepts cue memories, or both. However, this novel paradigm represents a departure from the normal approach of conceptualizing self-concepts as being constructed from memories. For instance, Addis and Tippett (2004) found that the reduction in memory in Alzheimer's disease was related to deficits in self-knowledge. Because Alzheimer's disease is conceived as first and foremost a memory deficit, this suggests that memory changes lead to changes in the accessibility of the self-concept. To conclude, this study shows that more readily-accessible self-concepts were rated as more personally significant and were more efficacious in cueing autobiographical memories. A next step might be to explore the utility of using different types of self-concept (e.g. positive/negative, or congruent/incongruent with the self) to cue autobiographical memories and to further 'measure' access to self-concepts by examining the speed at which people can generate various statements about themselves. The present study supports the idea that the self is a powerful organizational structure in cognition. Rathbone, C.J., & Moulin, C.J.A. (in press). Measuring autobiographical fluency in the self-memory system. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 13ReferencesAddis, R.A., and Tippet, L.J. (2004). Memory of myself: autobiographical memory and identity inAlzheimer’s disease. Memory, 12, 56-74. Benton, A. (1968). Differential behavioral effects on frontal lobe disease. Neuropsychologia, 6, 53– 60.Brédart, S., Delchambre, M., & Laureys, S. (2006). One’s own face is hard to ignore. QuarterlyJournal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 46-52.Conway, M.A. (2005). 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Culture effects on adults' earliest childhood recollection and self-description:Implications for the relation between memory and the self. Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 81(2), 220-233. Rathbone, C.J., & Moulin, C.J.A. (in press). Measuring autobiographical fluency in the self-memory system. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 15Table 1: Mean (and standard deviation) for number of memories generated and personal significanceratings by serial position of identity statement on the IAM Task Serial position of identity statement 1st5th10th15th20th Number of memoriesgenerated9.45 (4.31) 7.53 (4.03) 7.83 (4.09) 7.58 (3.25) 7.28 (4.51) Personal significance rating 8.16 (1.95) 7.11 (2.24) 6.76 (1.40) 6.50 (2.28) 6.55 (6.65) Rathbone, C.J., & Moulin, C.J.A. (in press). Measuring autobiographical fluency in the self-memory system. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 16Figure 1: Paradigm Design Rathbone, C.J., & Moulin, C.J.A. (in press). Measuring autobiographical fluency in the self-memory system. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 17i Data on age of emergence was collected for the purposes of a larger cross-study database. As these data werenot relevant to the present study no results involving this variable are reported.