MEMORY FOR THE TIME OF PAST EVENTS

Laboratory and autobiographical studies of normal adults' memory for the time of past events are reviewed, and the main phenomena that have been discovered are described. A distinction is introduced among several kinds of information on which this knowledge could be based: information about distances, locations, and relative times of occurrence. The main theories of memory for time are classified in these terms, and each theory is evaluated in light of the available evidence. In spite of the common intuition that chronology is a basic property of autobiographical memory, the research reviewed demonstrates that there is no single, natural temporal code in human memory. Instead, a chronological past depends on a process of active, repeated construction.