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 ’ prox-imity or order with respect to a major holiday, but the order of the 2 target events was well recalled by 6 years. Temporal information is an important, and for some theorists defining, feature of autobiographical memory. Remembered life events seem to belong to specific times in our past, even if we cannot always determine the times with precision. Cognitive psy-chologists have posited a number of ways in which remembered events can be related to time and have conducted a substantial number of studies to test these theories. In a review of this literature, Fried