MALTREATED CHILDREN'S ABILITY TO ESTIMATE TEMPORAL LOCATION AND NUMEROSITY OF PLACEMENT CHANGES AND COURT VISITS.

Research examining children's temporal knowledge has tended to utilize brief temporal intervals and singular, neutral events, and is not readily generalizable to legal settings in which maltreated children are asked temporal questions about salient, repeated abuse that often occurred in the distant past. To understand how well maltreated children can describe temporal location and numerosity of documented, personal experiences, we assessed 167 6- to 10-year-old maltreated children's temporal memory for changes in their living arrangements and prior visits to court. Small percentages of children were capable of providing exact temporal location information (age, month, or season) regarding their first or last placement or court experience, or numerosities for placements or court visits.

Do people remember the temporal proximity of unrelated events?

In the present study, we tested the ability to remember the temporal proximity of two unrelated events that had happened within 7 days of one another. In three experiments, 1,909 participants judged whether pairs of news events, ranging in age from 1 month to about 6 years, had occurred within a week of each other and, if not, how far apart they had occurred. Some event pairs were related, and others were unrelated.

Aging and the speed of time.

Correlational and experimental methods provide evidence relevant to seven theories of humans' general impressions of the speed of time, including theories of the purported subjective acceleration of time with aging. A total of 1865 adults from two countries, ranging in age from 16 to 80, reported how fast time appears to pass over different spans of time. Other measures tapped the experience of life changes and time pressure, and experimental manipulations were used to test two models based on forward telescoping and difficulty of recall.

The development of temporal metamemory.

In two studies of knowledge about the properties and processes of memory for the times of past events, 178 children from 5 through 13 years of age and 40 adults answered questions about how they would remember times on different scales, how temporal memory is affected by retention interval, and the usefulness of different methods. The adults showed quite accurate knowledge about the main properties of memory for time and the processes that underlie it. Different properties and processes were first understood at ages ranging from 8 years to 12 years or later.

The role of reminding in long-term memory for temporal order.

Order codes are one of the three main types of information that have been hypothesized to underlie memory for the times of life events. Published evidence for the theory, however, has come exclusively from research in which brief retention intervals have been used. In the first of two studies, 101 adults judged the order of pairs of movies released 5-14 years ago, half of which shared a common major actor.

The mental representation of countries.

Three studies were conducted to describe adults' knowledge of the countries of the world. Undergraduates from a selective liberal arts college recognised nearly two-thirds of nations, and about one-third were produced in a free-recall task. The use of information related to countries' locations was an important determinant of order of recall.

Development of temporal-reconstructive abilities.

In a study of the ability to reconstruct the times of past events, 86 children from 4 to 13 years recalled the times of 2 in-class demonstrations that had occurred 3 months earlier and judged the times of hypothetical events. Many of the abilities needed to reconstruct the times of events were present by 6 years, including the capacity to interpret many temporally relevant cues, but there were substantial changes well into middle childhood in the availability of temporally useful episodic information. Children were poor at remembering the events' proximity or order with respect to a major holiday, but the order of the 2 target events was well recalled by 6 years.

The effects of aging on location-based and distance-based processes in memory for time.

Retrieving when an event occurred may depend on an estimation of the age of the event (distance-based processes) or on strategic reconstruction processes based on contextual information associated with the event (location-based processes). Young and older participants performed a list discrimination task that has been designed to dissociate the contribution of both types of processes. An adapted Remember/Know/Guess procedure [Can.

ERP old/new effects at different retention intervals in recency discrimination tasks.

Recognition memory studies have suggested that event-related brain potentials (ERPs) may tap into several different memory processes. In particular, two ERP components have been hypothesized as related to familiarity (FN400 old/new effect, 300-500 ms, anterior) and recollection processes (parietal old/new effect, 400-800 ms, posterior). The functional significance of the FN400 old/new effect is uncertain because similar old/new differences have been shown to disappear at moderately long retention intervals.

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.

Arrows of time in early childhood.

Three studies with 149 children were conducted to provide information about development of the perception of temporally unidirectional transformations, such as dropping blocks or breaking a cookie. Children 3.5 through 6.

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.