When asking questions about things that happened in the past, it is significantly easier for someone to confirm whether something is true or not rather than retracing a series of past events.
This is useful to keep in mind for the UX of onboarding flows. Asking a user when something happened is 10x more difficult than asking did something happen.
See also:
- The average American consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words of information, getting them to recall anything is difficult.
- User experience entropy contributes to making it more difficult to accomplish a task.