Friedman & Wilkins (1985)

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Abstract

Paraphrase, not the publisher's wording. The study asks how people remember when past events occurred. Stimuli were ten news events from six months to twenty years before testing. Departing from earlier work, subjects estimated each event's time on multiple scales: year, month, day of the month, day of the week, and hour. If judgments draw on direct information about a memory's age, accuracy should fall steadily as the scale gets finer; if subjects instead reconstruct the time from fragmentary information associated with the event, finer scales should sometimes beat coarser ones. Accuracy, confidence, and number of recall cues all supported the reconstructive account. Subjects reported varied cue types, the most common being memory for a personal experience contiguous with the news event.

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