A follow-up to "Scale Effects in Memory for the Time of Events": The earthquake study

Abstract

This study is a follow-up to Friedman and Wilkins's (1985) experiments on memory for the time of past events. That research showed that judgments of the time of past news events are often more accurate on finer than on grosser time scales. This finding is consistent with a reconstructive model but troublesome for models emphasizing judgments of the age of a memory. The present study was designed to control for the possibility that scale differences in Friedman and Wilkins's study were due to the use of general time knowledge to infer when events of a given sort were likely to have occurred. Ninety-nine subjects estimated the time of an earthquake that had occurred 9 months prior to recall and that they reported having actually experienced. Separate estimates were given on each of five time scales ranging from year to hour. Recall of hour was extremely accurate in spite of the relative inaccuracy of the next three grosser time scales. This and other results support Friedman and Wilkins's original interpretation. © 1987 Psychonomic Society, Inc.