CHILDREN COMPARISONS OF THE RECENCY OF 2 EVENTS FROM THE PAST YEAR

Research on memory for time has been limited by the difficulty of dise ntangling several of the fundamentally different processes that contri bute to a chronological sense of the past. This study used a developme ntal approach to isolate one of these processes, impressions of distan ces 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 yea rs of age were able to discriminate the recency of their birthday and Christmas with great accuracy when the events were widely separated an d 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 loc ations of the events and their relative times of occurrence could only be interpreted correctly by children older than 9 years.