Ordering our world: An examination of time in autobiographical memory

Abstract

In two studies people judged the order in which two real-world events occurred. Ordering performance was better for events that were recent or widely separated in time. Ordering performance was also consistently related to predicted event memorability and to the amount of processing given to an event during encoding. Ordering performance was not consistently related to the person-typicality, pleasantness, or emotional intensity of the events, and was also not related to whether the two events judged came from the same thematic category. These results suggest that memory for event order is not entirely reconstructed from event content. We suggest that the self-concept may sometimes serve as an implicit timekeeper in autobiographical memory.