ABSTRACT
Klein and Loftus' (Chapter 1, this volume) model of self-knowledge has two main features. One is that long-term trait knowledge about the self is represented in an abstract, summary form, and the second is that this summary representation is independent of the representation of behaviors that serve as examples of the traits. One type of evidence that Klein and Loftus offer for this is that remembering an episode in which one exhibited a trait does not facilitate a later decision about whether the trait is self-descriptive. Likewise, deciding whether a trait is self-descriptive does not facilitate the speed with which one can remember an episode involving the trait. A second type of evidence is that the relationship between how well a trait describes oneself and the time to make self-descriptiveness judgments is different from the relationship between how well a trait describes oneself and the time to remember episodes in which the trait was exhibited. When subjects judge self-descriptiveness, they respond faster to traits that are high or low in self-descriptiveness than to traits that are medium in self-descriptiveness. However, behavioral episodes involving highly descriptive traits are remembered faster than episodes involving traits of medium descriptiveness, which in turn are faster than episodes involving low descriptive traits.
