The force of events: cross-modality matching the recency of news events.

Subjects recorded their impressions of the recency of news events by squeezing a dynamometer. This measure of recency was significantly related to the vividness of the memory for the event, when actual date was controlled for, and the relationship was stronger than that obtained when subjects wrote down their estimates of the dates. The results support the existence of distance-based processes such as inference from trace strength in our memory for when events occurred.