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.