ABSTRACT
Klein, Babey, & Sherman, 1997; Klein, Chan, & Loftus, 1999). Much of the research exploring memory for self-events has focused on the content of such stored memories. This focus is entirely appropriate: after all, the content of those memories may provide substantial grist for the self-inference mill (see Sedikides & Skowronski, 1995), regardless of whether inferences are made when events occur or when events are retrieved. However, in our view, a third important component of self-knowledge is temporal knowledge. That is, the self not only contains a sense of what a person is right now, but it also conveys a sense of growth, development, and change. Are you the same person today that you were yesterday? Are you the same person that you were last week, last month, or last year? Are
you the same person today that you were before the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center? These questions would not easily be answerable without knowledge of when events happened.
