Event memory: temporal-order judgments of personal life experiences

Three experiments with undergraduate subjects investigated the mental representations that people form when they recall and chronologically order their personal experiences. Subjects in each study first recalled five events that occurred to them in two general periods of their life (e.g., high school and college). Later, they saw pairs of these events and judged the order in which they occurred. It typically took less time to compare events that occurred in different time periods than events that occurred in the same period. However, response times depended on the serial positions of the compared events in each time period, and the distance between them, in ways that varied over the three experiments. These effects were interpreted in terms of a model of event memory and judgment proposed by Wyer, Shoben, Fuhrman, and Bodenhausen (1985). Specifically, subjects appear to organize the events they are asked to recall into categories defined by the periods of life in which they occurred and assign temporal codes to these categories. However, they do not perform a more detailed temporal coding of the events they recall unless a coherent temporal representation of these events is difficult to construct. A direct comparison between judgments of personal experiences and judgments of others' experiences suggested that people may make more detailed temporal coding of others' experiences than they do of their own.