Telescoping effect
[1] Although telescoping occurs in both the forward and backward directions, in general the effect is to increase the number of events reported too recently.
[3] The original work on telescoping is usually attributed to a 1964 article by Neter and Joseph Waksberg in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
[4] A real-world example of the telescoping effect is the case of Ferdi Elsas, an infamous kidnapper and murderer in the Netherlands.
[5] Due to forward telescoping, people thought Ferdi Elsas' sentence started more recently than it actually did.
[6] Telescoping is studied in psychology by asking participants to recall dates or to estimate the recency of a personal event.
[7] Their recollections are then compared to the actual dates and details of the events in order to determine if telescoping has occurred.
Thompson et al. used the conveyor belt model of memory to explain forward telescoping.
[9] Since people underestimate memory loss over long periods of time, target events are moved closer to the present.
According to this theory, if a person is unsure of a date, they minimize their chance of erring by placing events toward the middle of the period.
A study by Lee and Brown in 2004 looked at how four different groups dated news events under different conditions.
When asked questions about frequency, people often answer using phrases like "all the time" and "everyday" and therefore don't account for exceptions.
[6] Psychologists have studied the telescoping effect in children because a person's development can have a significant impact on his or her memory.
This finding is significant because it probably occurs for adults as well, and therefore people's earliest memories are reported as more recent than they actually are.
[14] Participants age 60 and older show a decrease in the degree of forward telescoping and tend to date events too remotely instead of too recently.
[17] Neter and Waksberg also developed a procedure called bounded recall to help decrease the effect of telescoping.
As a person's temporal framework becomes more elaborate, they have more reference points from which to date events and commit fewer telescoping errors.
Studies of the telescoping effect have examined the reported age of onset of smoking, alcohol, and drug use.
[19] In the United States, in the 1950s, a telescoping effect was observed with women entering alcohol abuse treatment programs with shorter histories than their male counterparts, but with symptoms of equivalent severity.
[20] The forward telescoping of alcohol histories is still prevalent today and has since been observed in opiate abuse and pathological gambling.
[20] Several theories have been suggested to explain the effect, though the exact mechanism remains unclear.
Respondents on marketing research surveys are often inaccurate when recalling the time period of their last purchase, and forward telescoping is common.
