in the pair. In other words, if the participant was given the word horse, they would need to fill in the last four letters of the word saddle.The researchers discovered that the group that was asked to fill in the blanks had better recall for these word pairs than the group that was asked to simply remember the word pairs. Self-Reference Effect Research illustrates that the self-reference effect aids encoding. The self-reference effect is the idea that individuals will encode information more effectively if they can personally relate to the information. For example, some people may claim that some birth dates of family members and friends are easier to remember than others. Some researchers claim this may be due to the self-reference effect. For example, some birth dates are easier for individuals to recall if the date is close to their own birth date or any other dates they deem important, such as anniversary dates. Research has shown that after being encoded, self-reference effect is more effective when it comes to recalling memory than semantic encoding. Researchers have found that the self-reference effect goes more hand and hand with elaborative rehearsal. Elaborative rehearsal is more often than not, found to have a positive correlation with the improvement of retrieving information from memories. Self-reference effect has shown to be more effective when retrieving information after it has been encoded when being compared to other methods such as semantic encoding. Also, it is important to know that studies have concluded that self-reference effect can be used to encode information among all ages. However, they have determined that older adults are more limited in their use of the self-reference effect when being tested with younger adults. Salience When an item or idea is considered "salient", it means the item or idea appears to noticeably stand out. When information is salient, it may be encoded in memory more efficiently than if the information did not stand out to the learner. In reference to encoding, any event involving survival may be considered salient. Research has shown that survival may be related to the self-reference effect due to evolutionary mechanisms. Researchers have discovered that even words that are high in survival value are encoded better than words that are ranked lower in survival value. Some research supports evolution, claiming that the human species remembers content associated with survival. Some researchers wanted to see for themselves whether