New Perspectives on Memory and Self

Who am I? Our memories seem to play a key role in shaping who we are. This requires an advanced theoretical understanding in many respects. Substantial progress has been made in investigating the theoretical and empirical foundations of both episodic memory and the self. Nevertheless, a systematic integration of insights from these two areas of research is still lacking. Around 2000, Martin Conway began to integrate these insights with his proposal of a self-memory system. However, there is still a gap in our understanding of how to integrate the expanding insights from the last decade of research on the self and memory into an adequate account of the self-memory system and its dynamics. This is precisely what the volume achieves. We have collected innovative contributions concerning new conceptualizations and empirical investigations of the self in light of memory research, as well as recent investigations of episodic and autobiographical memory in light of insights about the self and self-consciousness. Understanding the self-memory system is now relevant not only for understanding healthy individuals, but also for making progress in our understanding of mental disorders.