Dating recent and historical events

Abstract Subjects were asked to date 28 ‘recent’ public events that had occurred in the previous 7 years, and 28 ‘historical’ events that occurred between 1765 and 1947. For both kinds of event, the age of older events was underestimated and that of more recent events overestimated, a result agreeing with previous research. Whether the events were well or poorly known, as rated by a separate sample of subjects, affected the dating error of historical but not recent events. The results suggest that both recent and historical events are dated by a rather abstract, constructive process, rather than by cues relating to the age of the memory or the time of its formation.