Memory processes underlying humans' chronological sense of the past
Abstract
How do we remember the times of past events? What information in memory allows us to know when an event occurred? Usually, we take for granted that memory is infused with chronology. The term ·autobiographical memory’, used by some cognitive psychologists to describe memory for personal events, seems to imply a particular metaphor: that memory is like a narrative of one’s life, organized by chronology, much as the sequence of chapters and pages of a book might reflect the order in which the events of a life unfold. In this chapter I wil1 try to show that events are not chronologically organized in memory nor is there even a special system for assigning temporal codes to individual memories. Personal memories, instead, are individual episodes-islands in time. Only by recon structing when an event must have occurred or by assessing the vividness of a memory can we place it in time. And even this latter, intuitive sense of how long ago an event took place is distorted, with considerable compression of the subjective ages of events beyond the recent past.
Repository Citation
Friedman, William J. 2001. "Memory processes underlying humans' chronological sense of the past." Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, edited by Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack, 139-168. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Publication Date
7-19-2001
Department
Psychology
Document Type
Book Chapter
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198250357.003.0006
Keywords
Chronologically, Cognitive, Psychologists, Personal, Chronology
ISBN
9780198250357
Language
English
Format
text
