Individuals perform better when remembering and recognizing items that belong to themselves other than those belong to others, even if the ownership association between objects and subjects is only transient and imaginary. This is called the ownership effect in memory. This effect occurs also in young children and individuals with cognitive deficits. There is also cross-cultural difference in the appearance of this effect between individuals in Eastern and Western culture. Researchers have explored some internal mechanism of this effect, such as semantic organization, attention, self-choice and physical actions. At the time subjects watch items belong to themselves, there is an enhanced P300, which supplies an electrical proof that attention plays an important role in the ownership effect in memory. When subjects are to recognize items that are classified as their own in the prior ownership classification task, some brain regions in cortical midline structure, such as medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex supramarginal gyri and parietal cortex, are activated. Future studies should consider the role of some other processing (such as reward learning) in this effect, and to explain this phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective by conducting studies with primates. Tapping the brain mechanism of individuals with cognitive impairment will be helpful to enrich studies in this field.