ABSTRACT
Thinking about a self as existing through time depends on making personal sense of everyday experiences and integrating these into a coherent story of the self. Thus, a temporally extended self is fundamentally and necessarily an autobiographical self that includes an awareness of self-continuity and enduring, personally meaningful memories. Developing this temporally extended and autobiographical
self-concept occurs in the context of children’s everyday lives as they learn to evaluate and interpret events with significant others and to make connections between events using relevant cognitive tools available to them at the moment. Therefore, in this chapter I outline a model that situates the development of an autobiographical self in social contexts and cognitive achievements of early childhood. First, representational abilities involved in social metacognition are discussed that may help children become active participants in conversations through which they learn how to organize representations of experience and remember the past. I then emphasize the importance of developing a personal and evaluative subjective perspective for interpreting experience and constructing an autobiographical self. Last, I compare the proposed model with other current views on the emergence of the temporally extended self and its relation to autobiographical memory.
