Current Self-Models in the Reconstruction of Past Episodic Detail

Reconstruction of the personal past is well explained at two levels. At the level of attributes, implicit-theory and consistency-bias models specify how the present self anchors recall of what one used to be like. At the level of event reports, survey question-answering models specify how generic knowledge is converted into reports of past behaviour when episodic enumeration fails, and dual-trace accounts such as fuzzy-trace theory specify how gist-consistent content is produced once verbatim detail has decayed. Generative filling of episodic content is itself an established phenomenon, and self-serving reconstruction of a real autobiographical narrative against a verbatim record has been documented. This paper is a conceptual review and gap analysis. It distinguishes three levels of content: attributes, discrete outcome events, and procedural signatures. The first is well established in the literature. The second is substantially covered by existing research, including vote-recall, survey-reporting, and dual-trace accounts. For procedural signatures, however, this review identified neither evidence nor a model addressing reconstruction of the manner in which a specific past action was performed. The narrowed question is whether reconstruction of a specific episode's behavioural content is generated from the self-model current at retrieval when that model has changed since encoding, and whether the resulting content is experienced as recollection rather than estimation. Six candidate accounts are considered at equal weight: gist-based reconstruction, rate-based estimation, a deflationary account on which no relevant explicit theory exists at that level, fluency misattribution, motivated reconstruction, and self-model substitution. Existing evidence does not discriminate between these accounts, and the paper does not claim that it does. Two predictions motivating the project are contradicted and revised, a third is downgraded, and an earlier non-monotonic trace-strength revision is withdrawn because fuzzy-trace theory already predicts the relevant pattern. The paper therefore identifies a narrower unresolved question and specifies the experimental manipulations that could adjudicate between competing explanations. Keywords: autobiographical memory; reconstructive memory; fuzzy-trace theory; survey question answering; implicit theories; motor imagery; source monitoring; belief in occurrence.