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DEVELOPMENT, 1991, 62,139-155. 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. Ghildren 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 die 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.

This study addressed the question of how people remember the time of past events. Stimuli were 10 news events that had occurred from 6 months to 20 years before the study. In contrast to previous studies of memory for time, subjects were asked to provide estimates of the stimulus events on multiple time scales, including year, month, day of the month, day of the week, and hour. If judgments are based on direct information about the age of the memory, accuracy should decrease monotonically as one moves to finer scales. Alternatively, if subjects reconstruct the time from fragmentary information associated with the event, one would expect that estimates on finer time scales would often exceed grosser scales in accuracy. Results for accuracy, confidence, and number of recall cues supported the latter position. In addition, subjects reported a variety of types of recall cues, the most common being memory for personal experiences or events that were contiguous with the news event. 168In contrast to the progress made in describing many memory phenomena, our understanding of how people answer "when" questions is still quite poor. We know that elapsed time is a potent influence on the ability to remember, but we know little about how temporal information is extracted when people try to recall the time of an event. In some memory models (e.g., Lindsay & Norman, 1977), time is a concept attached to event nodes, but the nature of the information embedded in that concept is far from clear. Among the possible accounts of the storage of time information in memory are (1) that events are organized in memory in a time-ordered format, (2) that explicit time tags are laid down at the time of encoding, (3) that decay of trace strength provides time information, (4) that events are interrelated by order codes, and (5) that idiosyncratic contextual information associated with a trace is used to deduce the time of events (see Hintzman, Block, & Summers, 1973, Linton, 1975, Tzeng & Cotton, 1980, and Underwood, 1977.Most of the research relevant to the issue has involved asking subjects to judge the serial position of individual words or the relative recency of pairs of words from sequentially presented lists. These laboratory studies generally are designed to minimize external information about the time of presentation so that models such as (1), (2),

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What then is time? I know well enough what it is provided nobody asks me; but if I am asked and try to explain, I am baffled.'' (St. Augustine, 1961, p. 264) St. Augustine's dilemma, familiar to anyone beginning to consider the nature of time, is rooted in large measure in the fact that a single word refers to may different things, including natural periodicities, temporal-causal relations, and the distinction between the past, present, and future. Even within psychology, the term time perception is often used to describe all of the perceptual and cognitive processes that contribute to our experience of time. But the experience of time is multifaceted, depending on many different processes to adapt to different temporal features of the environment. The multiplicity of temporal experience is perhaps most evident when one examines the development of children's adaptation to time. Different abilities emerge in early infancy, during childhood, during adolescence, and even later, making clear that our experience of time has many different parts. This chapter was written to illustrate the diversity of humans' experience of time by providing examples of its components and the different ages at which they are found. It is also intended to provide a summary of the main findings from many of the approaches that developmental psychologists have taken. It is not a comprehensive review; the literature is too extensive in some areas for this to be practical in a single chapter. But many of the references can help the interested reader find additional sources in a particular area. In addition to summarizing findings, the concluding section provides some ideas about the reasons behind the developmental pattern. The general perspective offered here is that the natural and social environments are rich in temporal information of various sorts and that the process of development is a matter of adapting to much of this information. Children experience a physical