Premium
Children's Comparisons of the Recency of Two Events from the Past Year
Author(s) -
Friedman William J.,
Gardner Amanda C.,
Zubin Naomi R. E.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00916.x
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology
Research on memory for time has been limited by the difficulty of disentangling several of the fundamentally different processes that contribute to a chronological sense of the past. This study used a developmental approach to isolate one of these processes, impressions of distances in the past. Large samples of children between 3 and 12 years were asked to judge which was longer ago, their birthday or Christmas (and, in one study, Halloween and Thanksgiving). Even children under 6 years of age were able to discriminate the recency of their birthday and Christmas with great accuracy when the events were widely separated and one was within the past several months. The ability to discriminate recency on these scales appears to be a basic property of human memory that changes little with development. Other information about the locations of the events and their relative times of occurrence could only be interpreted correctly by children older than 9 years.