Stan Klein

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Klein et al. (2023) argued that the evolutionary transition from respondent to agent during the Cambrian explosion would be a promising vantage point from which to gain insight into the evolution of organic sentience. They focused on how increased competition for resources—in consequence of the proliferation of new, neurally sophisticated life-form...

Laplacean Determinism is the thesis that every event that transpires in a closed universe is a physical event caused (i.e., determined) in full by some earlier event in accordance with laws that govern their behavior. On this view, it is possible, in principle, to make perfect predictions of the state of the universe at any time Tn on the basis of...

The explanatory challenge of sentience is known as the “hard problem of consciousness”: How does subjective experience arise from physical objects and their relations? Despite some optimistic claims, the perennial struggle with this question shows little evidence of imminent resolution. In this article, I focus on the “why” rather than on the “how”...

Drawing on ideas from philosophy (in particular, epistemology), I argue that one of memory’s most important functions is to provide its owner with knowledge of the physical world. This knowledge helps satisfy the organism’s need to confer stability on an ever-changing reality so the objects in which it consists can be identified and reidentified. I...

The attempt of empiricist psychology to achieve scientific respectability through reliance on quantification is deeply flawed. Not only does it come at the expense of the phenomena, which, in the study of the mind, must reference subjectivity, but it is incommensurate with the basic scientific principles on which it claims to operate. Specifically,...

Speaker: Stanley B. Klein; Professor of Psychology; Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara; USA/ Event Access: https://www.skyroom.online/ch/batouli/brainee/l/en

I argue that academic psychology’s quest to achieve scientific respectability by reliance on quantification and objectification is deeply flawed. Specifically, psychological theory typically cannot support prognostication beyond the binary opposition of “effect present/effect absent.” Accordingly, the “numbers” assigned to experimental results amou...

This article is about the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness (i.e., how is subjective experience possible given the scientific presumption that everything from molecules to minerals to minds is wholly physical?). I first argue that one of the most valuable tools in the scientific arsenal (metaphor) cannot be recruited to address the hard prob...

I argue that appreciation of the phenomenon of forgetting requires serious attention to its origins and place in nature. This, in turn, necessitates metaphysical inquiry as well as empirical backing—a combination likely to be eschewed by psychological orthodoxy. But, if we hope to avoid the conceptual vacuity that characterizes too much of contempo...

Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, he or she typically is not aware of this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article, I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012)....

With the exception of Professor Taliafero, the commentaries on my article fail to engage with the points I raised. In my reply, I concisely restate my thesis in the hope that future readers will more easily be able to track my arguments.

This introductory chapter reviews research on future-oriented mental time travel to date (the past), provides an overview of the contents of the book (the present), and enumerates some possible research directions suggested by the latter (the future).

In their critique of Klein (2014a), Trafimow and Earp present two theses. First, they argue that, contra Klein, a well-specified theory is not a necessary condition for successful replication. Second, they contend that even when there is a well-specified theory, replication depends more on auxiliary assumptions than on theory proper. I take issue w...

I examine some of the key scientific precommitments of modern psychology, and argue that their adoption has the unintended consequence of rendering a purely psychological analysis of mind indistinguishable from a purely biological treatment. And, because these precommitments sanction an “authority of the biological,” explanation of phenomena tradit...

I argue that our current practice of ascribing the term 'memory' to mental states and processes lacks epistemic warrant. Memory, according to the 'received view', is any state or process that results from the sequential stages of encoding, storage, and retrieval. By these criteria, memory, or its footprint, can be seen in virtually every mental sta...

The relations between the semantic and episodic-autobiographical memory systems are more complex than described in the target article. We argue that understanding the noetic/autonoetic distinction provides critical insights into the foundation of the delineation between the two memory systems. Clarity with respect to the criteria for classification...

I argue that the feeling that one is the owner of his or her mental states is not an intrinsic property of those states. Rather, it consists in a contingent relation between consciousness and its intentional objects. As such, there are (a variety of) circumstances, varying in their interpretive clarity, in which this relation can come undone. When...

In this article I argue for the importance of treating mental experience on its own terms. In defense of “experiential realism,” I offer a critique of modern psychology’s all-too-frequent attempts to effect an objectification and quantification of personal subjectivity. The question is “What can we learn about experiential reality from indices that...

Abstract Following the seminal work of Ingvar (1985), Suddendorf (1994) and Tulving (1985), exploration of the ability to anticipate and prepare for future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty has grown into a thriving research enterprise. A fundamental tenet of this line of inquiry is that future-oriented mental time travel, in most o...

In this paper I discuss philosophical and psychological treatments of the question “how do we decide that an occurrent mental state is a memory and not, say a thought or imagination?” This issue has proven notoriously difficult to resolve, with most proposed indices, criteria and heuristics failing to achieve consensus. Part of the difficulty, I ar...

I suggest that the recent, highly visible, and often heated debate over failures to replicate results in the social sciences reveals more than the need for greater attention to the pragmatics and value of empirical falsification. It is also a symptom of a serious issue—the under-developed state of theory in many areas of psychology. While I focus o...

Some people are especially physically adept, others carry dangerous pathogens, some have valuable and rare knowledge, and still others cheat or deceive those around them. Because of these differences, and the costs and benefits they pose, natural selection has crafted mechanisms of partner choice that are selective: some people are chosen as social...

In this paper I examine the concept of cross-temporal personal identity (diachronicity). This particular form of identity has vexed theorists for centuries—e.g., how can a person maintain a belief in the sameness of self over time in the face of continual psychological and physical change? I first discuss various forms of the sameness relation and...

In this paper, I first consider a famous objection that the standard interpretation of the Lockean account of diachronicity (i.e., one’s sense of personal identity over time) via psychological connectedness falls prey to breaks in one’s personal narrative. I argue that recent case studies show that while this critique may hold with regard to some l...

This article has two goals. First, I want to respond to concerns voiced by Ruby (2013). Since these concerns are not limited to Ruby, they provide an opportunity to address the issues she raises for a broad audience of neuroscientists. Second, and related to my first goal, I want to alert investigators who are familiar only with our neuropsychologi...

In this paper I argue that radiological attempts to elucidate the properties of self -- an endeavor currently popular in the social neurosciences -- are fraught with conceptual difficulties. I first discuss several philosophical criteria that increase the chances we are posing the "right" questions to nature. I then discuss whether these criteria a...

Common wisdom, philosophical analysis and psychological research share the view that memory is subjectively positioned toward the past: specifically, memory enables one to become re-acquainted with the objects and events of his or her past. In this paper I call this assumption into question. As I hope to show, memory has been designed by natural se...

Disturbance of self is a core feature of schizophrenia. In this article, we argue that a nuanced appreciation of self is necessary to understand the relation between the self and its disruption. After discussing evidence for the fractionation of self into several functionally independent yet normally interacting systems of knowledge, we focus on a...

I discuss the relation between future mental time travel (FMTT) and episodic and semantic memory. I then examine the nature of the "self" assumed to be projected or imagined in the future and types of subjective temporalities. Based on this discussion, I argue that a person absent episodic memory could imagine a personal future as the result of (a)...

Episodic memory often is conceptualized as a uniquely human system of long-term memory that makes available knowledge accompanied by the temporal and spatial context in which that knowledge was acquired. Retrieval from episodic memory entails a form of first-person subjectivity called autonoetic consciousness that provides a sense that a recollecti...

Research on future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) is highly active yet somewhat unruly. I believe this is due, in large part, to the complexity of both the tasks used to test FMTT and the concepts involved. Extraordinary care is a necessity when grappling with such complex and perplexing metaphysical constructs as self and time and their co-ins...

In a recent paper Hart and Burns (2012) presented evidence that conditions that prime thoughts of one's mortality benefit recall. Drawing on the conceptual relation between thoughts of death and thoughts of survival, Hart and Burns interpret their findings as suggestive of the possibility that death-related thoughts function in manner similar to su...

This study examined whether encoding conditions that encourage thoughts about the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) are necessary to produce optimal recall in the adaptive memory paradigm. Participants were asked to judge a list of words for their relevance to personal survival under two survival-based scenarios. In one condition, the EE...

In this paper, I have three goals. First, I argue that the self, a concept whose tremendous utility for psychological theory is matched by its absence of clarity, can be meaningfully divided into two broad theoretical categories: the self of neural instantiation and the self of first-person experience (i.e., conscious awareness of personal subjecti...

In this paper I argue that much of the confusion and mystery surrounding the concept of Self can be traced to a failure to appreciate the distinction between the self as a collection of diverse neural components that provide us with our beliefs, memories, desires, personality, emotions, etc. (the epistemological self) and the self that is best conc...

This paper examines the role of self-reference as a possible mechanism underlying the superior recall found with survival processing. I suggest that previous failures to find comparable recall with self-referential encoding may be due to neglecting to ensure that task instructions require episodic retrieval. The studies reported herein show that wh...

The author argues that the self is a multifaceted entity that does not easily submit to clear and precise description. The aspect of self studied by most investigators is actually a subset of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of "self" and not the "self" of first-person subjectivity. The author then looks at the dominant theoretical treatment...

Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity—the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past. We present a neurological case study of a patient who has accurate memories of scenes from his past, but for whom the memories lack the sense of mineness. On the basis of this case study, we propose that the sense of identity de...

In this article, we demonstrate that planning tasks enhance recall when the context of planning (a) is self-referential and (b) draws on familiar scenarios represented in episodic memory. Specifically, we show that when planning tasks are sorted according to the degree to which they evoke memories of personally familiar scenarios (e.g., planning a...

Memory for items encoded self-referentially was examined in college students with Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In Study 1, memory was assessed using the standard self-reference effect (SRE) paradigm—which requires participants to access semantic trait self-knowledge to perform self-referential encoding (e.g., Klein, 200434. Klei...

In a series of papers, Nairne and colleagues have demonstrated that tasks encouraging participants to judge words for relevance to survival led to better recall than did tasks lacking survival relevance. Klein, Robertson, and Delton (2010) presented data suggesting that the future-directed temporal orientation of the survival task (e.g., planning),...

As part of a general trend toward interdisciplinary approaches, the social cognitive neurosciences was founded on the premise that research into social issues that take the brain seriously have much to contribute to our understanding of social thought and behavior. However, despite this goal, reliance on a specific set of techniques-neuroimaging-ha...

This paper explores the question of what the self is by reviewing research conducted with both normal and neuropsychological participants. Findings converge on the idea that the self may be more complex and differentiated than some previous treatments of the topic have suggested. Although some aspects of self-knowledge such as episodic recollection...

What is the self? Philosophers and psychologists pursuing an answer to this question immediately find themselves immersed in a host of questions about mind and body, subject and object, object and process, the homunculus, free will, self-awareness, and a variety of other puzzling matters that largely have eluded satisfying theoretical explication....

This paper examines the issue of what the self is by reviewing neuropsychological research, which converges on the idea that the self may be more complex and differentiated than previous treatments of the topic have suggested. Although some aspects of self-knowledge such as episodic recollection may be compromised in individuals, other aspects-for...

All organisms capable of long-term memory are necessarily oriented toward the future. We propose that one of the most important adaptive functions of long-term episodic memory is to store information about the past in the service of planning for the personal future. Because a system should have especially efficient performance when engaged in a tas...

Over the past two decades, an abundance of evidence has shown that individuals typically rely on semantic summary knowledge when making trait judgments about self and others (for reviews, see Klein, 2004; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008). But why form trait summaries if one can consult the original episodes on which the summary was based? C...

We examined the ability of a patient suffering from Prosopagnosia - an impairment of face recognition following neurological damage - to draw accurate trait inferences from faces of persons he knows but fails to recognize. Although not reliably greater than chance when judging the faces of well-known others, his trait ratings achieved considerable...

This study probes whether a prosopagnosic patient can make accurate explicit affective judgements towards faces. Patient MJH was shown photographs of faces of well-liked family members and public figures rated as “evil” by opinion polls. MJH was asked to rate each face on two 7-point scales (Likeability and Pleasantness). Since he is unable to expl...

Evidence suggests that stories are used universally to describe a series of events (e.g., Barthes, 1977). One reason for this universality may be that narrative construction aids in understanding and predicting social events: Narrative structures provide information about what can be expected in a given situation-as well as what might go wrong. In...

In a recent paper, Sakaki (2007) proposed that Klein and Loftus's conclusion that semantic and episodic trait self-knowledge are functionally independent (e.g., Klein, Babey, & Sherman, 1997; Klein & Loftus, 1993a; Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992b) was based on questionable assumptions and not supported by the available evidence. In this pa...

We investigated the effects of evidence order on juror verdicts. Results from 4 mock juror studies suggest that incriminating evidence is more likely to lead to a guilty verdict when it is presented late in the trial than when it is presented early. This recency effect was found both with admissible and inadmissible evidence. Further analyses sugge...

Clinical descriptions of Alzheimer's disease often indicate that the patient suffers from a loss of a "sense of self." Recent work on the structure of representations spe- cialized for knowledge about the self has suggested that aspects of self-knowledge may be separable from one another (e.g., Klein, 2004). Here, we report a case of a woman with l...

In this paper we argue that autobiographical memory can be conceptualized as a mental state resulting from the interplay of a set of psychological capaci- ties—self-reflection, self-agency, self-ownership and personal temporal- ity—that transform a memorial representation into an autobiographical personal experience. We first review evidence from a...

We report the case of R. J., an individual with autism. R. J.'s developmental disorder has impaired his ability to retrieve episodic memories as well as his ability to acquire consensually shared knowledge of animals, foods, and ob- jects (Klein, Cosmides, Costabile, & Mei, 2002). Nevertheless, R. J. has de- veloped normal, consensually accurate kn...

We report the case of K.R., an individual with Alzheimer's dementia. Although K.R. has difficulty retrieving even mundane facts about the world, she has accurate knowledge of her own personality. But the self she knows is out-of-date. K.R.'s inability to update her trait self-knowledge stands in contrast to other neuropsychological cases in which i...

One of the most exciting trends in psychology has been the increasing use of data and conceptual tools derived from the study of patients with neuropsychological syndromes to address questions about normal mental function. To date, however, personality theorists seldom have considered neuropsychological case material (Klein & Kihlstrom, 1998). In t...

This article examines the effects of memory loss on a patient's ability to remember the past and imagine the future. We present the case of D.B., who, as a result of hypoxic brain damage, suffered severe amnesia for the personally experienced past. By contrast, his knowledge of the nonpersonal past was relatively preserved. A similar pattern was ev...

A full understanding of the biology and behavior of humans cannot be complete without the collective contributions of the social sciences, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences. This book collects eighty-two of the foundational articles in the emerging discipline of social neuroscience. The book addresses five main areas of research: multilevel int...

Memory evolved to supply useful, timely information to the organism's decision-making systems. Therefore, decision rules, multiple memory systems, and the search engines that link them should have coevolved to mesh in a coadapted, functionally interlocking way. This adaptationist perspective suggested the scope hypothesis: When a generalization is...

Over the last several years, researchers have begun to appreciate the ways in which questions of interest to personality and social psychologists can be addressed with neuropyschological case material (e.g., Klein & Kihlstrom, 1998; Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 1996; Macrae, Bodenhausen, Schloerscheidt, & Milne, 1998). In this paper we show how a ne...

Trait judgments draw on two kinds of memory: (a) trait summaries, which provide information in the form of a generalization, and (b) memories of episodes in which a person behaved in ways that are relevant to the trait. According to the scope hy-pothesis (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Klein, Cosmides, Tooby, & Chance, in press), a trait summary is...

Knowledge of one's traits and personal recollections of specific events involving those traits are assumed to reflect the operations of two distinct, neurally dissociable types of memory: Semantic personal memory and episodic personal memory (e.g., Conway, 1992; Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 1996; Tulving, 1993b). The present study offers support for...

The authors propose a summary-plus-exception model of trait knowledge. According to this model, (a) knowledge of a target's traits consists of abstract trait summaries to which are linked memories of specific instances in which the target's behavior was inconsistent with generalizations contained in a summary, and (b) summary-inconsistent behaviora...

Although cognitive psychology has learned much from the study of patients with neuropsychological impairments, social and personality psychologists have been slow to do the same. In this article we argue that the domain of clinical neuropsychology holds considerable untapped potential for formulating and testing models within social and personality...

Two experiments examined the role of memory for behavioral episodes in judgments about in-groups and out-groups. Using a minimal group paradigm, 168 undergraduates read either positive or negative trait-relevant behaviors performed by group members. They then were asked to make judgments about the group's trait characteristics. Results demonstrated...

In a series of studies, Klein and Loftus and their colleagues found that people who made self-descriptiveness judgments about trait words were no faster than people who performed a control task to subsequently retrieve behavioral memories about the same traits (e.g., Klein, Loftus, & Burton, 1989; Klein & Loftus, 1990, 1993a, 1993c). Based, in part...

Research by Klein and Loftus (e.g., Klein & Loftus, 1993a, 1993c) has suggested that the development of trait self-knowledge follows a particular sequence. When people have performed relatively few trait-relevant behaviors, their trait knowledge is represented episodically; but as their trait-relevant behaviors increase, they begin to abstract trai...

The authors present the case of W.J., who, as a result of a head injury, temporarily lost access to her episodic memory. W.J. was asked both during her amnesia and following its resolution to make trait judgments about herself. Because her responses when she could access episodic memories were consistent with her responses when she could not, the a...

The authors present the case of W.J., who, as a result of a head injury, temporarily lost access to her episodic memory. W.J. was asked both during her amnesia and following its resolution to make trait judgments about herself. Because her responses when she could access episodic memories were consistent with her responses when she could not, the a...

A priming procedure (e g, Klein, Loftus Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992) was used to test a hierarchical model of self-knowledge According to this model, people simultaneously hold multiple representations of themselves that differ both in their context specificity and in the type of knowledge of which they consist Specifically, context-independent self-k...

Tested a developmental model of impression formation. Results of Exp 1 indicated that the mental representation of personality impressions depends on the perceiver's degree of experience with the impression target. At low levels of experience, impressions consist primarily of stored behavioral exemplars. However, as experience increases, an abstrac...

The role of motivation in producing hypermnesia (increased recall over successive efforts) was examined in two studies using false feedback to manipulate subjects' beliefs about their ability to perform memory tasks. The first study demonstrated that feedback that heightened subjects' performance expectancies led to increased hypermnesic recall. Th...

A new technique for evaluating the roles of elaborative and organizational processing in the representation of social information is described. Although these concepts have found increasing application in theories of social knowledge, most investigations of elaboration and organization have relied on measures that can lead to interpretive ambiguiti...

A new technique for evaluating the roles of elaborative and organizational processing in the representation of social information is described. Although these concepts have found increasing application in theories of social knowledge, most investigations of elaboration and organization have relied on measures that can lead to interpretive ambiguiti...

How do people determine whether a trait is self-descriptive? The authors recently proposed and tested a "mixed" model of the trait self-judgment process that asserts that two types of self knowledge abstract trait summaries and specific behavioral exemplars-are used to make trait judgments about the self, and that the relative importance of each is...

Hodgkin and Reed-Sternberg cells, the putative malignant cells of Hodgkin's disease (HD), carry regularly the CD25 antigen that forms one chain of the interleukin-2 (IL-2) receptor (IL-2R alpha). To analyze the putative role of IL-2R expression in Hodgkin's disease, we have investigated the expression of both IL-2R alpha and IL-2R beta chains in HD...

In a recent series of studies, Klein and Loftus and their colleagues have shown that trait judgments about the self are uninfluenced by the prior retrieval of trait-relevant behavioral memories. In this article, two types of behavioral memories are distinguished-specific and summary. A study is reported that, in contrast to the authors' earlier stu...

How do people decide whether a trait is self-descriptive? According to the computational view, judging a trait for self-descriptiveness is accomplished by retrieving trait-relevant autobiographical episodes from memory and computing the similarity of the trait to the information retrieved. By contrast, the trait summary view argues that trait judgm...

The production of cytokines was analysed in Hodgkin's disease (HD) derived cell lines by enzyme linked immunosorbent tests (ELISA) and Northern blot experiments. Our results demonstrate that HD derived cell lines produce a variety of cytokines, such as IL1 alpha, IL4, IL5, IL6, IL8, TNF alpha, TNF beta and GM-CSF but not IL1 beta, IL2, IL3 and G-CS...

According to pure exemplar models, trait judgments about the self and others are accomplished by retrieving from memory trait-exemplifying behaviors and computing the similarity between the trait and the exemplars retrieved. By contrast, pure abstraction models argue that trait judgments are made by directly accessing abstract, summary knowledge of...

The complex histological pattern in Hodgkin's disease and in part in large cell anaplastic lymphomas (ALCL) suggests that close interactions exist between the tumor cells and reactive bystander cells. These interactions are most likely mediated by short ranged cytokines. The production of cytokines was analyzed in primary tissues and cell lines fro...

Interleukin 6 (IL-6) is a pleiotropic lymphokine which can stimulate a variety of cells including B and T lymphocytes. It has been suggested that IL-6 plays a crucial role in several diseases such as human plasmacytoma, cardiac myxoma or Castleman's Disease by autocrine or paracrine stimulation. To analyse whether IL-6 is involved in the biology of...

We have examined the Hodgkin's disease derived cell line Co in terms of its capacity to differentiate in vitro. Co cells show the characteristics of immature T cells and express CD3 molecules in the cytoplasm. On activation with 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA) these cells express the CD3 antigen and the T cell receptor alpha beta (TCR al...

Hodgkin’s disease (HD) involves one of the very few tumors in which chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy can cure the patient in most instances. Also, the histological appearance is very special, and this is a reason why the molecular analysis was hampered in the past. The lymphoma is very heterogeneous, and low numbers of distinct Hodgkin (H) and Ster...

Expression of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and IL-6 receptors has been demonstrated in Hodgkin and Reed-Sternberg (H and RS) cells in vitro and in vivo. In order to evaluate the clinical significance of IL-6 serum levels in patients with Hodgkin's disease (HD), we tested the sera of 56 untreated patients with HD by means of a sensitive sandwich ELISA. Whil...

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