The Elementary Research On The Characteristic Of The Retrospective Public Temporal Memory

In the retrospective paradigm, participants don't know in advance that they will later be asked to carry out tasks about public time, Studying the retrospective temporal memory has important value. At first, because people often experience the retrospective temporal memory, and this kind of memory greatly affect people's behavior and social intercourse. In addition, public news events is an absolutely necessary part of our daily life, and affect the quality of public life. This research elected 14 recognizable news events from 1995 to 2002,and asked subjects to recall temporal locus, temporal duration and temporal order of events. The results showed that:1 .The recalling accuracy of the retrospective temporal locus of public events will change with the farness and nearness of time. The recalling accuracy of the far time is low, however that of the near time is high, there is signal effect, and there is remarkable difference in the accuracy of year and month, the year accuracy is better than the month accuracy.2. There are not remarkable difference between attention degree and recalling year, month, temporal locus, temporal duration accuracy, but there are remarkable difference between attention degree and overestimation and underestimation percent rate.3. Retrospective temporal duration of public events is influenced by true duration, Subjects usually overestimate short temporal duration, andunderestimate long temporal duration, but they all underestimated three short temporal duration events as "leader visitation".4. There are signal effect and primacy effect in the retrospective temporal order recalling, Subjects tend to estimate that time is far if event is far,that time is near if event is near, however events order they estimate between them is confusing.5. Under recognition condition, the recalling accuracy of temporal locus, temporal duration and temporal order is better than that under free recalling condition.6.Retrospective time memory of public events what this experiment research accord with reconstructive theory and range-synthesis model of time.