Semantic self-knowledge and episodic self-knowledge: Independent or interrelated representations?

Abstract

In this study of the structure of self-knowledge, we examined priming effects for the recall of personal episodes in order to investigate whether abstract trait knowledge and personal episodes are independent mental representations. We found that accessing similar abstract representations of traits facilitated a faster recall of related personal episodes than did accessing irrelevant abstract representations of traits (Experiments 1 and 2), reading a nonword prime (Experiments 2 and 3), accessing knowledge of one's mother (Experiment 3), or accessing semantic knowledge (Experiment 3). Contrary to previous findings, which indicated that abstract trait knowledge is represented independently of related personal episodes (e.g., Klein & Loftus, 1993; Tulving, 1993), our results suggest that abstract trait knowledge is associated with personal episodes, and therefore that semantic self-knowledge is associated with episodic self-knowledge in long-term self-knowledge.