Cubelli, R. , Sellaro, R. & Fiorino, L.
University of Trento
In dating tasks, public and personal events, whose dates are unknown, tend to be judged as more recent than they really are. It has been proposed that such effect, called “telescoping effect”, might be due to various factors, including how accessible an event is or how far it is in time. The present study aimed at investigating some factors that can influence the subjective time of an event: participants’ age, degree of knowledge and temporal distance. To this end, two age-groups of participants (i.e., youngsters and adults) were asked to date 30 public target events and to rate the amount of information they knew about each event. The results showed that remote events were dated as more recent than their actual dates and recent events were estimated as more distant in time. The telescoping effect was larger for remote high-knowledge events, i.e. participants produced more errors in dating known events than in dating other events. Further, youngsters were more accurate than adults. Results can be accounted for by assuming that since the most known events are recalled more frequently, participants tend to remember the last retrieval episode, thus judging the event as closer in time.