Scale effects in memory for the timeof events
Arnold J Wilkins1985, Memory & Cognition
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
This study addressed the question of how people remember the time of past events. Stimuli were 10 news events that had occurred from 6 months to 20 years before the study. In contrast to previous studies of memory for time, subjects were asked to provide estimates of the stimulus events on multiple time scales, including year, month, day of the month, day of the week, and hour. If judgments are based on direct information about the age of the memory, accuracy should decrease monotonically as one moves to finer scales. Alternatively, if subjects reconstruct the time from fragmentary information associated with the event, one would expect that estimates on finer time scales would often exceed grosser scales in accuracy. Results for accuracy, confidence, and number of recall cues supported the latter position. In addition, subjects reported a variety of types of recall cues, the most common being memory for personal experiences or events that were contiguous with the news event.
Related papers
How language and event recall can shape memory for time
2018
A B S T R A C T How do we represent the duration of past events that we have conceptualized through language? Prior research suggests that memory for duration depends on the segmental structure perceived at encoding. However, it remains unclear why duration memory displays characteristic distortions and whether language-mediated encoding can further distort duration memory. Here we examine these questions and specifically ask whether the amount of event information recalled relative to the stimulus duration explains temporal distortions. In several studies, participants first studied animated stimuli described by phrases implying either fast or slow motion (e.g., a mule vs car going up a road). They then mentally reproduced the stimuli from memory (as if replaying them in their minds) and verbally recalled them. We manipulated the amount of stimulus study and the type of recall cue (visual vs linguistic) to assess the role of language and information recalled on the length of mental reproductions. Results indicated that the density of the information recalled (number of details recalled per second) explained temporal distortions: higher density events were lengthened and lower density events were shortened. Moreover, language additionally lengthened or shortened duration reproductions when phrases cued the task, suggesting that episodic details and verbal conceptual features were combined during recollection rather than encoding. These results suggest that the density of the details recalled and language-mediated recollection shape memory for event duration. We argue that temporal memory distortions stem from event encoding and retrieval mechanisms. Implications of these findings for theories of time, memory and language are discussed.
Effects of Order on Memory of Event Times
2021
Memorizing time of an event may employ two processes (1) encoding of the absolute time of events within an episode, (2) encoding of its relative order. Here we study interaction between these two processes. We performed experiments in which one or several items were presented, after which participants were asked to report the time of occurrence of items. When a single item was presented, the distribution of reported times was quite wide. When two or three items were presented, the relative order among them strongly affected the reported time of each of them. Bayesian theory that takes into account the memory for the events order is compatible with the experimental data, in particular in terms of the effect of order on absolute time reports. Our results suggest that people do not deduce order from memorized time, instead people's memory for absolute time of events relies critically on memorized order of the events.
Traces of times past: Representations of temporal intervals in memory
Memory & Cognition, 2011
Theories of time perception typically assume that some sort of memory represents time intervals. This memory component is typically underdeveloped in theories of time perception. Following earlier work that suggested that representations of different time intervals contaminate each other , an experiment was conducted in which subjects had to alternate in reproducing two intervals. In two conditions of the experiment, the duration of one of the intervals changed over the experiment, forcing subjects to adjust their representation of that interval, while keeping the other constant. The results show that the adjustment of one interval carried over to the other interval, indicating that subjects were not able to completely separate the two representations. We propose a temporal reference memory that is based on existing memory models . Our model assumes that the representation of an interval is based on a pool of recent experiences. In a series of simulations, we show that our pool model fits the data, while two alternative models that have previously been proposed do not.
The subjective dates of natural events in very-long-term memory
Cognitive Psychology, 1985
This research explores the problem of how people determine the time of public events, such as the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan or the Three-Mile Island accident. According to what here is called the accessibiliry principle, the subjective dates of these events depend in part on the amount that can be recalled about them: The more known, the more recent the event will seem. Experiments I and 2 demonstrate this effect when subjects estimate explicit dates for important news stories of the 1970s and 1980s. The same effect appears in Experiment 3 for subjects who rate the recency of less known events drawn from a single week. Accessibility also contributes to the amount of time needed to compare the subjective date of an event (e.g., the Jonestown suicides) to an explicitly presented date (e.g., November 1979), as shown in Experiment 4. The accessibility principle for time estimation can be conceived as one of a related group of retrieval-based inferences that plays a part in judgments of frequency and probability and ludg-men& about the falsity of a putative fact. 0 1985 Acadmc Press. 1~ and the stories' datelines locate the events to the year, month, and day; and careful readers could use these dates to time stamp their own memory of the events described. To the same purpose, they also could determine the time of the events from a calendar or from television. Then, if later called upon to say when Senate action on the MX missile occurred, they might be able to recall that it was the 19th of March 1985.
Memory for time: How people date events
Memory & Cognition, 2006
The effect of different formats on the accuracy of dating news and the distribution of personal events was examined in four conditions. In the first, participants had to date events in the absolute time format (e.g., “July 2004”), and in the second, they had to date events in the relative time format (e.g., “3 weeks ago”). In the other conditions, they were asked to choose between the two formats. We found a small backward telescoping effect for recent news events and a large forward telescoping effect for remote events. Events dated in the absolute time format were more accurate than those dated in the relative time format. Furthermore, participants preferred to date news events with the relative time format and personal events with the absolute time format, as well as preferring to date remote events in the relative time format and recent events in the absolute time format.
Self-events and other-events: Temporal dating and event memory
Memory & Cognition, 1997
Time representation in sentence comprehension
Acta Psychologica, 1985
In this study we have attempted to demonstrate the validity of certain hypotheses based on the assumption that in some cases we represent time by means of a linear vector. A verification task in which the subject had to judge the correctness of sentences such as 'he arrived yesterday', 'they will speak tomorrow' was used to test predictions from a model in which there were the following stages of processing: (a) tense representation, i.e., past, present, and future; (b) adverb representation i.e., the localization of particular moments; (c) verification of tense-adverb coincidence: (d) response selection and output. The results support the hypothesis that the past has a longer and more detailed representation than the present and the future. Second, the unit of measurement of time appears not to be constant, but to increase as a function of the distance from the present of the moment to be localized. Third, the present and the future tenses seem to have some typical moments:
Metric and chronological time in human episodic memory
The relative contributions of metric and chronological time in the encoding of episodic memories are unknown. One hundred one healthy young adults viewed 48 unique episodes of visual events and were later tested on recall of the order of events (chronological time) and the precise timing of events (metric time). The behavioral results show that metric recall accuracy correlates with chronological accuracy for events within episodes, but does not play a role on larger time-scales across episodes. Functional magnetic resonance imaging during encoding and recall showed that metric time was represented in the posterior medial entorhinal cortex, as well as the temporal pole and the cerebellum, whereas chronological time was represented in a widespread brain network including the anterior lateral entorhinal cortex, hippocampus, parahippocampal cortex and the prefrontal cortex. We conclude that metric time has a role in episodic memory on short time-scales and is mainly subserved by medial...
Memory retrieval as temporal discrimination
Journal of Memory and Language, 2009
Temporal distinctiveness models of memory retrieval claim that memories are organised partly in terms of their positions along a temporal dimension, and suggest that memory retrieval involves temporal discrimination. According to such models the retrievability of memories should be related to the discriminability of their temporal distances at the time of retrieval. This prediction is tested directly in three pairs of experiments that examine (a) memory retrieval and (b) identification of temporal durations that correspond to the temporal distances of the memories. Qualitative similarities between memory retrieval and temporal discrimination are found in probed serial recall (Experiments 1 and 2), immediate and delayed free recall (Experiments 3 and 4) and probed serial recall of grouped lists (Experiments 5 and 6). The results are interpreted as consistent with the suggestion that memory retrieval is indeed akin to temporal discrimination.
Using Personal Landmark Events Improves Judgments about Time, but not Contents, in Autobiographical Memory
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2013
Landmark events are strong memories that function as reference points for other memories. We examined whether people's accuracy in recalling when an earlier target event occurred was related to whether they spontaneously used personal landmark events or not. Participants completed two questionnaires separated by 2-31 days. In the first, they described a personal event including what happened, who was there, where it was, and when it occurred. In the second questionnaire, they recalled the personal event and specific details. They also described whether they had used landmark events to assist their recall. Overall, participants' memories for temporal and content information faded over time. Spontaneous use of landmark events was associated with an increase in participants' recall of temporal information but not content information. Analysis of the landmark events revealed that almost two-thirds were significant events, such as birthdays, parties, and travel-related events. Applications of the findings are discussed.
Effect of instructions on memory for temporal order
Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1989
Time-related processes in time-based prospective memory and in time-interval production
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2009
Time-based prospective memory tasks require the retrieval of previously formed plans (e.g., call me on my mobile phone) either at a specified time (e.g., at 3 p.m.) or after a specified period of time has elapsed (e.g., in 3 min). In the present study, we investigated whether the same time-related processes are recruited for a short-duration time-based prospective memory task
Short-term memory for time in children and adults: A behavioral study and a model
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2007
This experiment investigated the effect of the short-term retention of duration on temporal discrimination in 5-and 8-year-olds, as well as in adults, by using an episodic temporal generalization task. In each age group, the participants' task was to compare two successive durations (a standard and a comparison duration) separated by a retention interval of 500 ms, 5 s, or 10 s, with the order of presentation of these two durations being counterbalanced. The results revealed a shortening effect for the first presented stimulus in all of the age groups, although this was greater in the younger children, thereby indicating the presence of a negative time-order error. Furthermore, introducing a retention delay between the two durations did not produce a shortening effect but instead flattened the generalization gradient, especially in the younger children. However, this flattening of the generalization gradient with the retention delay was more marked between 500 ms and 5 s than between 5 s and 10 s. Thus, retaining the first duration in short-term memory during a task requiring the comparison of two successive durations reduced temporal discrimination accuracy and did so to a greater extent in the younger children.
The Cognitive Representation of Time and Duration
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014
How do people represent the duration of an event in memory and which mechanisms except timing are involved in processing and maintaining temporal information within the cognitive system? The speakers of this symposium will address this and related questions. Anne-Claire Rattat focuses on long-term retention of durations in children and adults. Ruth Ogden discusses executive functions that are involved in timing and time perception. Hedderik van Rijn and Niels Taagten show how general principles of memory and attention can be connected with theories about time perception. Finally, Daniel Bratzke reviews prominent ideas about how temporal information is coded within and across sensory modalities. The titles and abstracts of the four talks are given below.
Individual differences in temporal information processing in humans
Acta neurobiologiae experimentalis, 2004
This article reviews some of our investigations concerning individual differences in temporal information processing. Two different levels of temporal information processing are discussed, namely the low-frequency (i.e., a few seconds time range) and the high-frequency processing level (i.e., some tens of milliseconds range) of temporal information with respect to various experimental paradigms. Evidence has been obtained indicating that the processing of temporal information on these two levels can be influenced by various subject-related factors, out of which age, gender, developmental disorders, auditory experience and localisation of damage in the brain seem to be the most significant.
Abstracting time in memory
2021
Planning the future relies on the ability to remember how long events last, yet, how durations are stored in memory is unknown. Here, we developed a novel n-item delayed duration reproduction task to assess whether elapsed time is stored as a continuous feature or as a discrete item in memory. In three experiments (N = 58), participants listened to non-rhythmic sequences composed of empty time intervals (durations), which they had to reproduce as precisely as possible following a delay period. We manipulated the number of time intervals (n-item) and the overall sequence duration to separate their effects on recall precision. In Experiment 1, the number of items and the sequence duration affected the precision of temporal reproduction (recall). In Experiment 2, orthogonalizing the number of items and the duration of the sequence, demonstrated that the precision of temporal reproduction systematically decreased with an increasing number of items, but not with sequence duration. Experi...
Is memory organized by temporal contiguity?
Memory & Cognition, 2015
The hypotheses that memories are ordered according to time and that contiguity is central to learning have recently reemerged in the human memory literature. This article reviews some of the key empirical findings behind this revival and some of the evidence against it, and finds the evidence for temporal organization unconvincing. A central problem is that, as many memory experiments are done, they have a prospective, as well as a retrospective, component. That is, if subjects can anticipate how they will be tested, they encode the to-be-remembered material in a way that they believe will facilitate performance on the anticipated test. Experiments that avoid this confounding factor have shown little or no evidence of organization by contiguity.
Temporal order in memory and interval timing: An interference analysis
Acta Psychologica, 2007
The eVect of varying load in memory tasks performed during a time interval production was examined. In a Wrst experiment, increasing load in memory search for temporal order aVected concurrent time production more strongly than varying load in a spatial memory task of equivalent diYculty. This result suggests that timing uses some speciWc resources also required in processing temporal order in memory, resources that would not be used in the spatial memory task. A second experiment showed that the interference between time production and memory search involving temporal order was stronger when, during the timing task, a decision was made on the temporal position of a memory item, than when information on temporal order was retained throughout the interval to be produced. These results underscore the importance of considering the speciWc resources and processes involved when the interference between timing and concurrent nontemporal tasks is analyzed.
Do people remember the temporal proximity of unrelated events?
Memory & Cognition, 2010
In the present study, we tested the ability to remember the temporal proximity of two unrelated events that had happened within 7 days of one another. In three experiments, 1,909 participants judged whether pairs of news events, ranging in age from 1 month to about 6 years, had occurred within a week of each other and, if not, how far apart they had occurred. Some event pairs were related, and others were unrelated. For unrelated event pairs, same-week and separation judgments were very poor. Accuracy was much greater for both kinds of judgments when the events were related. Participants often guessed the separation of unrelated event pairs, whereas they frequently deduced the separation or remembered the proximity of related event pairs. For both types of pairs, the participants reported using the strength of the memories or the general period in which the events had occurred.
Related topics
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.