telescoping

1. (psychology) The temporal displacement of an event in which people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are and distant events as being more recent than they are.Examples: "The telescoping effect is divided into backward telescoping and forward telescoping."; "Here we will show that telescoping is a result of the way the question is asked rather than a result of the compression of time."; "Telescoping happens in two directions: While forward telescoping describes the tendency of dating past events too close to the present, backward telescoping describes the opposite effect, that is, dating past events too far to the past."countableuncountable