LEAD

Chris Moulin

MCF Chaire d’Excellence, LEAD UMR 5022
Université de Bourgogne

« Self processes in cognition: Insights from Neuropsychology »
The self has typically been seen as one of the less tangible, complex concepts in psychology. Recently, however, it has been researched with reference to cognitive processes, with an emergent view being that the self operates as a powerful organising structure in cognition. I present some studies on healthy participants which support this view: Memories are temporally clustered around times of self formation. Further work on self and memory in autism and brain injury shows how the self is maintained by conceptual knowledge in the absense of episodic memory. The second half of the talk presents data from a novel fluency task which aims to assess access to self concepts. These data are presented in a developmental, lifespan perspective, showing that different aspects of selfhood become accessible across the lifespan. The talk finishes with an examination of how nebulous constructs such as the self can be better understood by taking into account data from special populations, such as in the neuropsychological approach, and how current thinking needs to stretch beyond the inherent circularity of 'bi-directional' relationships between the self and memory.