Is there something special about the self? A neuropsychological case study

Personal semantics: at the crossroads of semantic and episodic memory

“…In neuropsychological work, Klein and colleagues showed that self-knowledge can be preserved when EM and GS are impaired ( [58][59][60], see also [36]) and preserved even when knowledge of autobiographical facts is impaired [60,61]. This form of PS was considered to be intact when reasonable correlations were found between patients' selfreports about their personality traits and reports from family members.…”

Self-centered memories: The reminiscence bump and the self

“…Neuropsychological evidence from a case of amnesia, in which semantic self knowledge was accessed in the absence of episodic memory, suggests that the self can be known without a supporting network of associated memories (Klein, Cosmides, Costabile, & Mei, 2002). However, the same authors report a case of autism in which the participant had verifiable knowledge of his own identity traits, but had severely impaired semantic knowledge of other, nonself semantic facts (e.g., animals).…”

The unanticipated resilience of trait self-knowledge in the face of neural damage

“…These predictions have been extensively tested through paradigms that take advantage of priming, encoding specificity, and encoding variability. Priming results will be described below (for converging results using the other methods, see, e.g., Klein, Cosmides, Costabile, & Mei, 2002a;Klein, Cosmides, & Costabile, 2003;Klein & Loftus, 1993a;Klein, Loftus, & Plog, 1992a;Klein et al, 1989Klein et al, , 1992bKlein et al, , 1996aKlein, Babey, & Sherman, 1997; all the evidence so far accumulated is summarised in Klein et al, 2008b).…”