The Development of Children's Memory for the Time of Past Events

Previous research on adults' and children's memory for the time of past events has generally overlooked the fundamental distinction between knowledge of temporal distance in the past and knowledge of temporal locations. This study applied the distinction to the development of time memory. Children of 4, 6, and 8 years of age experienced 2 target events, one 7 weeks and the other 1 week before testing. They were asked to judge the relative recency of the 2 events and to localize the older event by time of day, day of the week, month, and season. Even the 4-year-olds were successful in judging the relative recency of the 2 events and localizing the older event by time of day. However, on the 3 longer time scales, only the 6- and 8-year-olds could localize the older event, reason about possible times that it could have occurred, or tell the present time. The great accuracy of the time-of-day judgments at all 3 ages is almost certainly not due to distance-type information. The results show the separate development of distance and location judgments.