The Cognitive Underpinnings of Continuous Identity: Higher Episodic Memory Recall and Lower Heuristic Usage Predicts Highest Levels of Self-Continuity

ABSTRACT

Continuous identity (CI) is a sense of persistent identity wherein the present self is seen as overlapping with the past and future selves. This study addressed the hypothesis that judgments of CI require successful retrieval of information by examining the relationship between varying levels of CI and two forms of memory recall. The pattern of findings indicated that high levels of cued memory recall combined with low levels of heuristic usage were associated with higher levels of CI, and this occurred for both past-to-present CI and present-to-future CI. We propose that to achieve high levels of CI, individuals need to access and analyze a fund of stored autobiographical information.

KEYWORDS:

• Availability heuristic
• continuous identity
• memory
• self-continuity
• self-identity

Notes

^1. These five letters were chosen by Tversky and Kahneman (1973) due to their status as the only consonants that are more common in the third position than the first and that are also not very rare (in contrast to the consonants x and y).

^2. An analogous set of procedures was used to assess the interaction between cued recall and past-to-present CI at varying levels of heuristic usage. Consistent with the pattern plotted in Figure 2, simple slopes tests revealed a significant positive association between past-to-present CI and cued recall for low levels of heuristic usage (B = 0.13, p < .05), but the opposite pattern occurred for high levels of heuristic usage (B = –0.12, p < .05).

^3. An analogous set of procedures was used to assess the interaction between cued recall and present-to-future CI at varying levels of heuristic usage. Consistent with the pattern plotted in Figure 3, simple slope tests revealed a significant positive association between present-to-future CI and cued recall for low levels of heuristic usage (B = 0.14, p < .01), but there was no significant relationship at high levels of heuristic usage (p > .05).