Memory for day of the week: a 5 + 2 day cycle

Abstract

People use a variety of schemes to keep track of time. One such scheme is the week, with its 7 distinctly named days. This article examines memory for day of the week and its relation to memory for time of day and for elapsed time (number of days). Data are presented from a study in which people answered a set of interview questions about the time of occurrence of a particular event. Two issues are addressed. The first issue concerns the way different temporal schemes are organized in relation to each other in memory. Memory for day of the week is independent of other aspects of temporal memory. The second issue concerns whether the week is organized hierarchically into either weekday periods or weekend periods or both. The weekday period forms a distinct 5-day unit within the 7-day weekly cycle. The present data, together with those from the authors' earlier work, suggest that the time an event occurred is encoded in relation to a set of separate temporal scripts (e.g., daily and weekly) and that such scripts may be hierarchically organized.