Several independent lines of thought come together in this book. The first of these is an ecological/cognitive analysis of the self that was initially proposed by one of us (Ulric Neisser) in 1988. Five different sources of self-relevant information were identified in that analysis and described in terms of the different “selves” that they establish. The “ecological” and “interpersonal” selves, based on perception, have been considered in a preceding volume called The Perceived Self. The “private” and “conceptual” selves will be the subject of a volume currently in preparation. Here we are concerned with what was initially called the “temporally extended” self-that is, with memory and the self-narrative.

The second group of ideas that animates this book comes from recent studies of memory development. The research of the last few years, including our own (Robyn Fivush), has made it obvious that remembering does not just happen. Instead it is a skill that must be learned, a socially motivated activity with a specific developmental history in early childhood. This means that the remembering self has a course of development too, one that is explored in several of these chapters.

Our third theme is one of the more prominent currents in late 20th-century intellectual life. The concept of narrative has recently become important across a surprisingly wide range of disciplines. The seven fields listed on the contributor information page of the Journal of Narrative and Life History – anthropology, education, folklore studies, linguistics, literary criticism, psychology, and sociology – are just the tip of the iceberg; history, philosophy, and theology are among many that could be added.

Human beings exist through time, just as everything else does: One thing happens after another. But unlike anything else, people remember what happened to them – some of it, anyway. This is a remarkable achievement. The remarkable thing is not just that past events influence the present (which happens in all biological systems) but that they are explicitly reconstructed by the person who experienced them. By definition, such reconstructions are examples of episodic memory. If the remembered event seems to have played a significant part in the life of the rememberer, it becomes an example of autobiographical memory and may form part of a life narrative. Life narratives are significant because they are one way of defining the self.

This book has two goals: to explore the relations between remembering and the self, and to see those relations in proper perspective. Life narratives are often described as if they were the chief or even the only ingredient of the self: “They [life narratives] are the basis of personal identity and self-understanding and they provide answers to the question ‘Who am I?’ ” (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 136). This claim goes too far: Self-knowledge depends on perception, conceptualization, and private experience as well as narrative (Neisser, 1988). Self-narratives are a basis but not the basis of identity. It is appropriate, then, that the present volume is only one of a series devoted to self-knowledge and the self. An earlier book (Neisser, 1993a) was concerned with ecological and interpersonal perception; the self-concept will be considered in a subsequent volume.

However important those other sources of self-knowledge may be, they are not our focus here.

This book brings new ideas to bear on an old problem. The old problem is that of self-knowledge and the self; the new ideas are based on analyses of ecological and social perception. James J. Gibson (1979) was the first theorist to insist that perceiving the self is an inevitable counterpart of perceiving the environment. Gibson's ideas are basic to the notion of an ecological self, which will be elaborated in this chapter. But the view of perception to be presented here is not simply ecological; it is social as well. Face-to-face interaction between individuals establishes a sense of an interpersonal self that is very different from anything the inanimate environment can offer. Both forms of self-perception appear very early in life, and both give rise to the experience of effective agency that is such an important component of self-awareness. They are the foundation on which other, more intellectual aspects of the self are built.

Because the term self has more than one meaning, it is best to begin with definitions. Distinctions among various kinds of self have been proposed for more than a century: William James's (1890) contrast between the “I” and the “me” was only the first of many such contrasts.

This fifth Emory Symposium in Cognition is both like and unlike its predecessors. It resembles them in its recognizably ecological emphasis, as well as in its attempt to integrate the study of adult cognition with that of development. Unlike them, however, its scope is not defined by a traditional field like “memory” or “categorization.” Instead, it is delineated by a more fundamental distinction, that between the self and everything else. William James said it best: “Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos at a different place” (1890: 290). As perceivers and thinkers, all human beings learn things about both sides of that dichotomy. We perceive, remember, and think about the world around us, but also about ourselves. This book, the first of three projected volumes, deals with perceiving. It focuses on two forms of self perception, the ecological and the interpersonal A companion volume on the remembering self follows soon; a third, still in preparation, will focus on self-concepts.

The self may be a new topic for cognitive psychologists, but not for everyone. Philosophers and psychologists of various persuasions have written about it for many years with considerable insight.