William J. Friedman

Scale effects in memory for the time of events

This study addressed the question of how people remember the time of past events. Stimuli were 10 news events that had occurred from 6 months to 20 years before the study. In contrast to previous studies of memory for time, subjects were asked to provide estimates of the stimulus events on multiple time scales, including year, month, day of the month, day of the week, and hour. If judgments are based on direct information about the age of the memory, accuracy should decrease monotonically as one moves to finer scales. Alternatively, if subjects reconstruct the time from fragmentary information associated with the event, one would expect that estimates on finer time scales would often exceed grosser scales in accuracy. Results for accuracy, confidence, and number of recall cues supported the latter position. In addition, subjects reported a variety of types of recall cues, the most common being memory for personal experiences or events that were contiguous with the news event.

Sex Differences in Moral Judgments? A Test of Gilligan's Theory

This study was designed to test Gilligans (1982) claim that men and women differ in moral judgments. One hundred and one college students read four traditional moral dilemmas and rated the importance of 12 considerations for deciding how the protagonist should respond. Six of the statements were derived from the description by Kohlberg et al. (1978) of post-conventional moral reasoning, and six were derived from Gilligans description of womens style of moral reasoning. Subjects also rated themselves on a measure of sex-typed personality attributes. There were no reliable sex differences on either of the types of moral reasoning, and confidence intervals allowed the rejection of all but negligible differences in the directions predicted by Gilligans model. Furthermore, men and women showed highly similar rank orders of the items for each dilemma. The personality measures also failed to predict individual differences in moral judgments.

Development of time concepts in children.

Publisher Summary Research on the development of time concepts has revealed somewhat different patterns in the cases of logical, conventional, and experiential time. The experiential mode, as studied by the perception of duration, appears well developed in young children. Conventional time probably has little influence on the thought of children younger than 5 years. Younger children begin to use tense contrasts and to represent the order of familiar activities but their understanding of a variety of temporal terms is characteristically action-bound. Over the next several years children learn several conventional series and associate time units with counting numbers; however, it is not until about 8 years that time measurement and some of the cyclic aspects of the calendar are mastered. During middle childhood, children become able to coordinate multiple cycles and series and to conceptualize cyclic recurrence, but they are generally unable to distinguish arbitrary from natural features of conventional time before mid-adolescence. Research in the development of logical time shows that before about 8 years succession and duration are unstable concepts, and that children are misled by perceptual aspects of many tasks. From infancy onward there is a purposeful ordering of action, and by 5 years children can imitate and verbalize relations of temporal succession.

The effects of elapsed time and retrieval on young children's judgments of the temporal distances of past events

Abstract Young children have very limited knowledge of long-term time patterns, but recent studies show that impressions of temporal distances provide them with some sense of the times of past events. These studies were investigations of (a) the function relating subjective to objective distances in the past for events whose ages range from less than 1 month to 1 year and (b) the effects of retrieving events on their subjective recency. In Study 1, 825 children (5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds) compared the recency of two school events from many months in the past shortly after one of the events was retrieved. In Study 2, 162 children (mean age 4.9 years) judged the distances in the past of their birthdays, summer, and 4 holidays by placing cards on a spatial continuum. In Study 3, 148 children (mean age 4.8 years) performed a similar task after the prior retrieval or priming of some of the events. Subjective temporal distance increased with real distance up to about 5 months, with no evident increase thereafter. Retrieval and priming had no effect on subjective recency. These findings show that early developing characteristics of memory provide young children with a differentiated sense of the times of events from past months. However, simple strength models cannot explain this ability.

Children's time memory: The development of a differentiated past ☆

Abstract This study investigated the ability of 4- to 9-year olds to retrieve memories from specific temporal locations in the past, including yesterday, last weekend, last summer, and several holidays from the past year. When childrens recollections were validated by teachers and parents, it was found that even 4- and 5-year-olds were able to produce accurate memories from nearly all of those times. Many of the recollections were specific to the occasion in question, showing that these categories of the past are both differentiated and updated. However, the ability to retrieve memories by temporal location does not imply an understanding of where the locations fell relative to one another. It was not until 8 to 9 years that children could order a set of locations from the past year, and even children in this oldest age group were unable to determine which of a pair of locations from the past year occurred in the more distant past. Furthermore, memory accuracy was unrelated to success on these temporal judgment tasks. These findings show that there are multiple levels in the development of a sense of the locations of autobiographical events.

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

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.

Differentiating location- and distance-based processes in memory for time: An ERP study

Memory for the time of events may benefit from reconstructive, location-based, and distance-based processes, but these processes are difficult to dissociate with behavioral methods. Neuropsychological research has emphasized the contribution of prefrontal brain mechanisms to memory for time but has not clearly differentiated location- from distance-based processing. The present experiment recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while subjects completed two different temporal memory tests, designed to emphasize either location- or distance-based processing. The subjects’ reports of locationbased versus distance-based strategies and the reaction time pattern validated our experimental manipulation. Late (800–1,800 msec) frontal ERP effects were related to location-based processing. The results provide support for a two-process theory of memory for time and suggest that frontal memory mechanisms are specifically related to reconstructive, location-based processing.

Arrows of time in infancy: the representation of temporal-causal invariances.

Many transformations that take place over time can only occur in one temporal direction, and adults are highly sensitive to the differences between forward and backward presentations of such events. In seven experiments using two selective-looking paradigms, 4- and 8-month-olds were shown forward and backward videotapes of events involving the effects of gravity on liquids and solid objects and of the separation of whole objects into pieces. Four-month-olds showed a significant preference for the forward version of liquid pouring from a beaker to a glass. Eight-month-olds looked longer at the forward versions of this and four other gravity-related events but showed no directional preferences for the separation events. Several experiments indicate that longer looking at the forward versions of the gravity stimuli is not a product of attraction to specific perceptual features of the stimuli. A model based on the development of representations of types of events is presented and evaluated.

On routes and routines: The early development of spatial and temporal representations

Abstract Despite apparently fundamental differences, time and space pose similar challenges for representational development. In both cases, children must code relationships between elements that are experienced one at a time. Two influential models of spatial and temporal knowledge in early childhood place considerable emphasis on the coding of sequential relations. These parallels led us to compare the operations that a group of preschool children (M age = 4, 7) could perform on their representations of their nursery school routine and a novel unidirectional route that we taught them. We found that for both contents, the children could describe the order of elements, arrange cards depicting the elements in forward order, and place the cards in backward order. When groups were equated on the basis of their forward-order competence on the route and routine tasks, similar levels of accuracy were shown on the two backward-order tasks. These findings support the existence of representational similarities, but additional research will be required to determine the extent of the overlap. Such research should also help us evaluate the adequacy of existing models of early spatial and temporal representation.

Why does life appear to speed up as people get older

In this study, the influence of contemporaneous and retrospective recall of time pressure on the experience of time was examined. Participants (N = 868) first indicated how fast the previous week, month, year, and 10 years had passed. No effects of age were found, except on the 10-year interval. The participants were subsequently asked how much time pressure they experienced presently and how much time pressure they had experienced 10 years ago. Participants who indicated that they were currently experiencing much time pressure reported that time was passing quickly on the shorter time intervals, whereas participants who indicated that they had been experiencing much time pressure 10 years ago reported that the previous 10 years had passed quickly. Cross-sectional comparisons of past and present time pressure suggested that participants systematically underestimated past time pressure. This memory bias offers an explanation of why life appears to speed up as people get older.