ABSTRACT
Not too long ago, many of us could feel comfortable discussing a range of paradigms and theories within broad domains such as social psychology or cognitive psychology. But with the explosion of scientific research in recent years, we now feel lucky if we can keep up with all the theories and paradigms in fairly narrow areas of specialization, like word identification or hindsight. Thus, it is impressive to see people like Klein and Loftus who not only have a broad knowledge of social psychology, but who are equally conversant with the literature on cognitive psychology. Their breadth of knowledge has served them well for it has allowed them to take some of the most promising paradigms and models from cognitive psychology and apply them to social phenomena that are often more relevant than the verbal learning phenomena (such as paired associate learning) for which these paradigms and models were initially developed. The result is that Klein and Loftus have produced some of the most interesting findings in recent years concerning how information about the self is represented and processed.
