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Telescoping Effect
In psychology and cognitive science, the “telescoping effect” is people's tendency to perceive recent events as being more remote than they are, and to perceive distant events as being more recent than they are. More specifically, the former is known as “backward telescoping” and is also sometimes referred to as “time expansion”, and the latter as is known as “forward telescoping”. Between backward and forward telescoping there is a point where events are just as likely to be displaced backward as forward in time. Recent events, within 3 years, are often reported with backward telescoping bias. Remote events, longer than 3 years ago, are often reported with forward telescoping bias. Three years is approximately the time frame in which events switch from being displaced backwards in time to forwards in time, with events occurring three years in the past being equally likely to be reported with forward telescoping bias as with backward telescoping bias. Although telescoping occurs in both the forward and backward directions, in general the effect is to increase the number of events reported too recently. This net effect in the forward direction is due to the fact that forces that impair memory, such as lack of salience, also impair time perception. Telescoping also leads to an over reporting of the frequency of events. This over reporting is due to the fact that participants include events beyond the period they are reporting for in their frequency count because of telescoping.

The original work on telescoping is usually attributed to a 1964 article by Neter and Waksberg in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. The term telescoping comes from the idea that time seems to shrink toward the present in the way that the distance to objects seems to shrink when they are viewed through a telescope. A real world of example of this effect is the case of Ferdi Elsas, an infamous kidnapper and murderer in the Netherlands. When he was let out of prison, most of the general population did not believe he had been in prison long enough. Due to forward telescoping, people thought Ferdi Elsas’ sentence occurred more recently than it actually did. Telescoping has important real world applications, especially in survey research. Marketing firms often use surveys to ask when consumers last bought a product, and government agencies often use surveys to discover information about drug abuse or about victimology. Telescoping may bias answers to these questions. Telescoping is studied in psychology by asking participants to recall dates or to estimate the recency of a personal event. Another procedure that is often used is called the diary procedure. In this procedure, the participants record personal events each day in a diary for several months. After the diary is completed, participants are asked to date events and assess how well they remember those events.

Accessibility Hypothesis
Brown, Rips, and Shell created the accessibility hypothesis. This hypothesis states that dates are estimated, not recalled, and these estimates are based on what is remembered about the event. Therefore memorable events should be recalled as occurring recently.

Conveyor Belt Model
Thompson et al. used the Conveyor Belt Model of memory to explain forward telescoping. It assumes that events are stored in the order that they occur. When an individual tries to remember the date of an event, they scan serially backward through memory. Since events are only remembered by order or time between events in this model, if an event is forgotten, previous events are recalled as if they occurred more recently and forward telescoping occurs. Although this model explains forward telescoping, it does not explain backward telescoping.

Guessing
Some psychologists have suggested that telescoping occurs because people are guessing the date of an event. 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. However, telescoping occurs at the same frequency if events are remembered well or if events are not remembered well. Therefore, guessing is not a complete explanation for telescoping.

The Boundary Model
Rubin and Baddley created the Boundary Model to explain telescoping. When people date events, they often get information from a bounded period, such as a year or a vacation. This model assumes events are not assigned outside of the boundaries of this period, so dating errors can only move toward the middle of a boundary. As well, this model assumes that since recent events are dated more accurately, forward telescoping has a stronger effect. It postulates that, without boundaries, an estimation would be unbiased. If the length of the bounded period decreases, telescoping errors occur earlier and dating errors increase.

There is some evidence against the boundary model. A study by Lee and Brown in 2004 looked at how four different groups dated news events under different conditions. They found that the different boundaries had no effect on date estimation and the existence of a boundary no effect on date estimation. This study suggests that telescoping is not due solely to boundaries.

Associative model
Kemp proposed the associative model to explain telescoping without using boundaries. Kemp believed that people used an association strategy that linked target events to other events for which dating information is available. According to Kemp, this association leads to a regression to the mean of known dates. This approach assumes that the date of an event is determined by using memories from other similar events, that ability to recall relevant information decreases overtime, and that the associated event is more likely to be more recent than the actual event.

A variation of this theory is the prototype model. This model states that prototypes can aid the process the dating events. People can use associated prototype events to help them recall events in the same way they use normal events.

Although the prototype is conceptually different from the association model, the two are not easy to distinguish experimentally. Both have been supported in experiments because participants are worse at estimating the dates of events if they have to date events spontaneously, and prototype event estimates resemble spontaneously estimated events. In contrast, the associative model does not predict what happens when people guess information, but does predict how bias will effect guessed date estimation. Therefore, the associative model, like the boundary effect model, cannot explain all aspects of telescoping but can explain new aspects of telescoping.

Other explanations
Heuristics

Main article: Heuristics

Some psychologists suggest telescoping errors are due to the heuristics used to answer dating and frequency questions. When asked questions about frequency, people often answer using phrases like “all the time” and “everyday” and therefore don’t account for exceptions. Depending on the events in question, this could lead to an over or under estimation of the occurrence of an event, and be perceived as telescoping.

Demand Characteristics

Responses to questions about the frequency of behavior can be biased because of demand characteristics. Respondents may provide too much information because they are trying to provide useful information, and therefore over report the frequency of events, which may be perceived as telescoping.

Marketing
Main Article: Marketing

Marketing firms often use survey data to estimate when consumers will next buy a product. Telescoping errors may bias these estimates and cause faulty marketing campaigns. Respondents on marketing research surveys are often inaccurate when recalling the time period of their last purchase, and forward telescoping is common. Backward telescoping is also common and leads to respondents overstating their intention to buy a replacement product as they underestimate the likelihood of their product breaking down. Telescoping has a significant effect on market research and therefore should be taken into account in marketing strategies.

Childhood
Psychologists have studied the telescoping effect in children because a person’s development can have a significant impact on his or her memory, A study of 8, 11, and 14 year olds observed telescoping at all ages, but to different degrees. The older children in the study had a greater tendency to telescope earlier memories and a weaker tendency to telescope recent memories than the younger children. Another significant finding of this study was that children’s telescoping errors occur for their earliest memories. This finding is significant because it likely occurs for adults as well and therefore people’s earliest memories are reported as more recent than they actually are. This finding indicates that the earliest memories reported in childhood amnesia literature should be questioned because they may have occurred earlier than they actually did.

Aging
Many older adults claim time speeds up as they get older. One explanation for this phenomenon is forward telescoping. Forward telescoping leads people to underestimate the amount of time that has occurred since an event. When people discover the true amount of time since that event, they may feel as if time has passed quickly. This explanation is one reason for why people perceive time as moving faster as they age, but it does not take into account changes in the amount of telescoping that occurs with age. To study the effects of age on telescoping, Crawley and Pring asked participants to estimate the day, month, and year of well-known disasters, political events, and other sensational events. They found that participants are best at accurately identifying dates when they are ages 35-50. 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. The sensation of time speeding up may be derived from the fact that time is subjectively longer and therefore people assume that the time must be going by more quickly.

Smoking and Alcohol
The telescoping effect is pertinent for behaviors such as smoking and alcohol usage, especially when they are early onset behaviors. Studies of the telescoping effect have examined the reported age of onset of smoking, alcohol, and drug use. Forward telescoping has been found in reported age of initial use of cigarettes and age of beginning daily smoking. Therefore, people may be misclassified as having late onset of drug use, when in reality, they had early onset. Forward telescoping of risky behaviors can be problematic in monitoring patients for issues associated with early onset drug use because if they are misclassified, they may not be correctly monitored. The same effect of forward telescoping is found for marijuana, alcohol, and hard drug usage. The implications of forward telescoping on these behaviors are similar to those of smoking.

Minimizing the Effect
The way a question is phrased is an important factor in minimizing the telescoping effect. If a question clearly defines the time period of interest, telescoping errors will be reduced. Also, if a question is more specific or difficult, it requires more reconstructive processes; therefore, the answers to these questions will include less telescoping.

Neter and Waksburg also developed a procedure called bounded recall to help decrease the effect of telescoping. In preliminary interviews, participants are asked about events and then, in later interviews, participants are reminded of these events and then asked about additional occurrences. One limitation of this process is that it requires information from preliminary interviews be correct.

A person’s temporal framework is also related to the amount of telescoping errors that they make. As a person’s temporal framework becomes more elaborate, they have more reference points from which to date events and commit fewer telescoping errors.