Stanley B. Klein

The multiplicity of self: neuropsychological evidence and its implications for the self as a construct in psychological research

This paper examines the issue of what the self is by reviewing neuropsychological research, which converges on the idea that the self may be more complex and differentiated than previous treatments of the topic have suggested. Although some aspects of self‐knowledge such as episodic recollection may be compromised in individuals, other aspects—for instance, semantic trait summaries—appear largely intact. Taken together, these findings support the idea that the self is not a single, unified entity. Rather, it is a set of interrelated, functionally independent systems. Implications for understanding the self in various areas of psychological research—e.g., neuroimaging, autism, amnesia, Alzheimers disease, and mirror self‐recognition—are discussed in brief.

Facing the future: Memory as an evolved system for planning future acts

All organisms capable of long-term memory are necessarily oriented toward the future. We propose that one of the most important adaptive functions of long-term episodic memory is to store information about the past in the service of planning for the personal future. Because a system should have especially efficient performance when engaged in a task that makes maximal use of its evolved machinery, we predicted that future-oriented planning would result in especially good memory relative to other memory tasks. We tested recall performance of a word list, using encoding tasks with different temporal perspectives (e.g., past, future) but a similar context. Consistent with our hypothesis, future-oriented encoding produced superior recall. We discuss these findings in light of their implications for the thesis that memory evolved to enable its possessor to anticipate and respond to future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty.

Development and Representation of Personality Impressions

A developmental model of impression formation was tested. Results indicated that the mental representation of personality impressions depends on the perceivers degree of experience with the impression target. At low levels of experience, impressions consist primarily of stored behavioral exemplars. However, as experience increases, an abstract impression is formed that is subsequently stored and retrieved independently of the behaviors on which it was based. Experiment 2 demonstrated that impressions continue to evolve once they have become abstract and that behavioral exemplars affect judgments even when they are not directly retrieved for judgment purposes. These findings highlight the importance of applying dynamic approaches to impression-formation research.

The complex act of projecting oneself into the future

Research on future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) is highly active yet somewhat unruly. I believe this is due, in large part, to the complexity of both the tasks used to test FMTT and the concepts involved. Extraordinary care is a necessity when grappling with such complex and perplexing metaphysical constructs as self and time and their co-instantiation in memory. In this review, I first discuss the relation between future mental time travel and types of memory (episodic and semantic). I then examine the nature of both the types of self-knowledge assumed to be projected into the future and the types of temporalities that constitute projective temporal experience. Finally, I argue that a person lacking episodic memory should nonetheless be able to imagine a personal future by virtue of (1) the fact that semantic, as well as episodic, memory can be self-referential, (2) autonoetic awareness is not a prerequisite for FMTT, and (3) semantic memory does, in fact, enable certain forms of personally oriented FMTT. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:63-79. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1210 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

On Bridging the Gap Between Social-Personality Psychology and Neuropsychology:

Although cognitive psychology has learned much from the study of patients with neuropsychological impairments, social and personality psychologists have been slow to do the same. In this article we argue that the domain of clinical neuropsychology holds considerable untapped potential for formulating and testing models within social and personality psychology and describe some of the ways in which questions of interest to social and personality psychologists can be addressed with neuropsychological data. Examples are drawn from a variety of neuropsychological syndromes, including amnesia, autism, anosognosia, commissurotomy, frontal lobe damage, and prosopagnosia. We conclude that consideration of the personal and social lives of patients with neuropsychological impairments ultimately will lead to a richer understanding of the person, one that bridges the gap between social and cognitive levels of analysis.

Making the case that episodic recollection is attributable to operations occurring at retrieval rather than to content stored in a dedicated subsystem of long-term memory

Episodic memory often is conceptualized as a uniquely human system of long-term memory that makes available knowledge accompanied by the temporal and spatial context in which that knowledge was acquired. Retrieval from episodic memory entails a form of first–person subjectivity called autonoetic consciousness that provides a sense that a recollection was something that took place in the experiencers personal past. In this paper I expand on this definition of episodic memory. Specifically, I suggest that (1) the core features assumed unique to episodic memory are shared by semantic memory, (2) episodic memory cannot be fully understood unless one appreciates that episodic recollection requires the coordinated function of a number of distinct, yet interacting, “enabling” systems. Although these systems—ownership, self, subjective temporality, and agency—are not traditionally viewed as memorial in nature, each is necessary for episodic recollection and jointly they may be sufficient, and (3) the type of subjective awareness provided by episodic recollection (autonoetic) is relational rather than intrinsic—i.e., it can be lost in certain patient populations, thus rendering episodic memory content indistinguishable from the content of semantic long-term memory.

The unanticipated resilience of trait self-knowledge in the face of neural damage.

This paper explores the question of what the self is by reviewing research conducted with both normal and neuropsychological participants. Findings converge on the idea that the self may be more complex and differentiated than some previous treatments of the topic have suggested. Although some aspects of self-knowledge such as episodic recollection may be compromised in individuals, other aspects—for instance, semantic trait summaries—appear largely intact. Taken together, these findings support the idea that the self is not a single, unified entity. Rather, it is a set of interrelated, functionally independent systems. In the process of reviewing neuropsychological findings, an unexpected result emerges: trait self-knowledge appears unusually robust with respect to neural and cognitive damage that render other aspects of self-knowledge dysfunctional in varying degrees.

Is there something special about the self? A neuropsychological case study

Abstract One of the most exciting trends in psychology has been the increasing use of data and conceptual tools derived from the study of patients with neuropsychological syndromes to address questions about normal mental function. To date, however, personality theorists seldom have considered neuropsychological case material ( Klein & Kihlstrom, 1998 ). In this paper we show how neuropsychological evidence can afford new insights for personality theorists. In particular, we show how examination of persons suffering from amnesia and autism can shed light on the way in which knowledge about self is represented in memory. We first review the literature on clinical amnesia and then present evidence from a new case study exploring the relation between personal and nonpersonal knowledge in a patient with autism. We conclude that the mind may have learning systems that are specialized both for acquiring and retrieving information about ones own personality.

Self, Memory, and the Self-Reference Effect An Examination of Conceptual and Methodological Issues

The author argues that the self is a multifaceted entity that does not easily submit to clear and precise description. The aspect of self studied by most investigators is actually a subset of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of “self” and not the “self” of first-person subjectivity. The author then looks at the dominant theoretical treatment of human long-term memory—the systems approach—and examines how the construct of “self” is situated in this framework. Finally, he reviews the best-known paradigm for exploring the role of self in memory—the self-reference effect (SRE) manipulation. He argues that there is not one SRE but rather a family of related SREs that are influenced by a variety of variables and contexts. Accordingly, researchers must exercise caution when attempting to draw conclusions about the self from the results of SRE memory performance.

The future-orientation of memory: Planning as a key component mediating the high levels of recall found with survival processing

In a series of papers, Nairne and colleagues have demonstrated that tasks encouraging participants to judge words for relevance to survival led to better recall than did tasks lacking survival relevance. Klein, Robertson, and Delton (2010) presented data suggesting that the future-directed temporal orientation of the survival task (e.g., planning), rather than survival per se, accounts for the good recall found with the task. In the present studies we manipulated the amount of survival and planning processing encouraged by a set of encoding tasks. Participants performed tasks that encouraged processing stimuli for their relevance to (a) both survival and planning, (b) planning, but not survival, or (c) survival but not planning. We predicted, and found, that recall performance associated with tasks encouraging planning (i.e., survival with planning and planning without survival) should exceed tasks that encouraged survival but not planning (i.e., survival without planning). We draw several conclusions. First, planning is a necessary component of the superior recall found in the survival paradigm. Second, memory, from an evolutionary perspective, is inherently prospective—tailored by natural selection to support future decisions and judgements that cannot be known in advance with certainty.