The reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory:

Effects of age, gender, education, and culture

Steve M. J. Janssen and Antonio G. Chessa
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Jaap M. J. Murre
University of Amsterdam and University of Maastricht, the Netherlands
We investigated the age distribution of autobiographical memories with the Galton-Crovitz method
through the Internet. Almost 2000 participants in the United States and the Netherlands aged between 11
and 70 years participated. They were presented with 10 cue words, and were asked to recall and date
autobiographical memories. We found strong evidence for a ``reminiscence bump'' in all participant
groups at all ages, with peaks at ages 1518 for men and 1314 for women. This peak could be localised
more precisely than in previous studies due to our large sample size. We were able to remove the for-
getting effect from the empirical age distribution with a method that allows separate estimation of
memory encoding and forgetting. American participants showed a tendency to report older memories
than the Dutch. Age group and level of education did not influence the lifetime encoding function.
What remains of a lifetime of memories? In 1879,
Sir Francis Galton first investigated a lifespan
retrieval curvenamely his own, recalling auto-
biographical memories with random cue words
and noting the date of the events recalled. This
curve is not a forgetting curve in the usual sense; it
is an estimate for the probability distribution of
memories encoded in different periods of life. This
cueing method aims to obtain a stratified sample
from memory. This process can be likened to a
hunt for Easter eggs, in which children who are
searching in parts of the garden where there are
many eggs will come up with fuller baskets. Cro-
vitz and Schiffman (1974) replicated Galton's
experiment (see also Crovitz & Quina-Holland,
1976) and since then many studies have used the
cueing method (e.g., Hyland & Ackerman, 1988;
McCormack, 1979; Rubin & Schulkind, 1997).
The results indicate that four periods characterise
the shape of the lifetime retrieval curve: (1)
Hardly any memories are retrieved from the first
few years of life (``childhood amnesia''); (2) There
is a ``reminiscence bump'' (Rubin, Wetzler, &
Nebes, 1986), that is, a local maximum in the
number of memories recalled, which is often
reported to occur between ages 10 and 30; (3) This
bump is followed by a period with fewer reported
memories; (4) In normal participants, there will be
a high proportion of reported memories from the
past 1 or 2 years. The reminiscence bump is not
only found in autobiographical memory, but also
in people's favourite films, music, and books
(Rubin, Rahhal, & Poon, 1998).
Two artefacts distort the shape of the lifetime
distribution function: the effect that recent
memories show less forgetting than old
memories, and the telescoping effect, which is a
systematic error in dating events. For young
MEMORY, 0000, 0 (0), 000000
#0000 Psychology Press Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/09658211.html DOI:10.1080/09658210444000322
Correspondence should be addressed to Steve M. J. Janssen, University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology, Roetersstraat
15, NL-1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Email: s.m.j.janssen@uva.nl
This research was supported by a grant by NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, to JM. We are grateful to
Herbert Crovitz, David Rubin, Ticu Constantin, and Martin Conway for helpful discussions and materials.
adults, a possible reminiscence bump may be
completely hidden by the recency effect in the
empirical distribution (see Figure 1). If we
assume that forgetting over time is similar for all
memories and all ages, we may be able to remove
the forgetting artefact from the observed curve. If
young adults do indeed store more memories at a
certain age, this reminiscence effect will be
uncovered.
The shape of the observed distribution of
memory age may also be distorted if participants
date their own memories without independent
controls, as is the case in some studies (Crovitz &
Schiffman, 1974; Galton, 1879). A well-known
systematic displacement of dated events in time is
the ``telescoping effect'' (Friedman, 1993),
whereby events may be dated as either too recent
(forward telescoping; this is the most common
type) or too remote (backward telescoping).
In this paper, we will describe a large-scale
Galton-Crovitz experiment that yielded nearly
20,000 observations, based on almost 2000 parti-
cipants from the Netherlands and the United
States in the age-range 1170. As a control for
telescoping, all participants also dated well-
known news events. The large number of
observations allows us to plot the lifespan
retrieval curve in much more detail than was
possible in earlier studies. We will also describe
and apply a method that removes the forgetting
artefact, unveiling the underlying encoding-sam-
pling functions (in the sequel: encoding func-
tions) and reminiscence bumps for different age
groups in both male and female Dutch and
American participants. We will focus on differ-
ences with respect to culture, gender, education
level, and participant age. We expect to find dif-
ferent autobiographical memory distributions for
different cultural groups (Benson, Jarvi, Arai,
Thielbar, Frye, & Goracke McDonald, 1992;
Conway, Wang, Hanyu, & Haque, in press),
which might suggest that the reminiscence bump
is caused by social factors, such as the develop-
ment of the self. We do not expect to find any
effects of gender (Fromholt & Larsen, 1991;
Hyland & Ackerman, 1988; McCormack, 1979)
or level of education. Furthermore, we expect to
find similar distributions for different age groups
after removing the recency effect. If we find such
a result, it might suggest that a life review process
that starts at a later age does not cause the remi-
niscence bump.
Figure 1. Illustration of how forgetting distorts the shape of the encoding function (solid line) in the observed distribution (indi-
vidual dots). (a) Constant encoding for a 30-year-old participant. (b) Encoding with an ``encoding bump''. In this hypothetical 30-
year-old participant, the shape of the bump is completely obscured by the forgetting of remote memories. (c) Constant encoding for a
50-year-old participant. (d) Encoding with a bump. The bump is now visible in the observed distribution but is shifted to the right.
2 JANSSEN, CHESSA, MURRE
METHOD
Participants
The test was administered via the Internet (http://
memory.uva.nl/testpanel/gc/). Participants could
come into contact with our test in one of three
ways. The first way was through a spontaneous
encounter with the website while surfing on the
Internet. Academic psychologists, for example,
may have found the site through links on research
sites. The second way was through a search
engine. Our site is indexed by several robots, and
regularly turns up as an entry while searching for
``memory'' and related topics. The third way was
through word of mouth.
The group of participants consisted of 963 men
and 995 women. Their average age was 38.38 years
(SD = 13.74). For the analyses, we subdivided
them into six age groups (see Table 1). Partici-
pants could only participate after having filled in
relevant personal details, such as their age, gen-
der, and level of education. Participants did not
get a financial reward for their participation. Only
fully completed tests were considered.
Materials
We selected 64 nouns from Paivio, Yuille, and
Madigan (1968) that had a score of at least 6.00 on
Concreteness, Imagery, and Meaningfulness
scales and were rated A or AA in the Thorndike-
Lorge frequency table. To assess the telescoping
effect, participants were given questions about the
date of certain well-known international and
national news events. The test contained 78
questions from the period 19532003. Every par-
ticipant received 10 news questions, selected ran-
domly from the period after their tenth birthday.
The news questions were selected from the
Amsterdam Media Questionnaire (AMV),
developed by Klomps (2001), and the Daily News
Memory Test (DNMT), developed by Meeter,
Murre, and Janssen (in press). The test was
offered in Dutch and English: instructions, cue
words, and the questions were translated.
The AMV is a retrograde amnesia test with
questions about news events from the 1950s until
the 1990s. The original AMV contains open-
ended questions (fill-in-the-blank questions)
about public events that have been answered
correctly by at least 70%of a reference population
of normal participants. The selected AMV ques-
tions were changed so that the participants had to
date news events. For example, ``Which princess
died in Paris at the end of August 1997?'' was
changed into ``When did Princess Diana die in
Paris?'' Events that could be dated through
deduction, such as Olympic Games or presidential
elections, were not selected.
The DNMT is an online test about recent news
events (http://memory.uva.nl) to which new
questions are added every day. We selected
questions about events from 20002003. From the
DNMT only multiple-choice questions that had
been answered correctly by 90% of the reference
population were selected. The format of the
DNMT questions was changed as above. For
instance, ``In which sea did the Russian submarine
Kursk sink on August 13, 2000?'' was changed into
``When did the Russian submarine Kursk sink?''
Procedure
The data reported in this paper were collected
from May 2002 until January 2003. After partici-
pants had read the instructions, they were ran-
domly given 10 cue words. The participants had to
describe briefly, in a few catchwords, the first
memory about a personal event that came to
mind, while inspecting each word.
1
The partici-
pants were explicitly told that the reported events
TABLE 1
Participants
Dutch American
Age groups Women Men Women Men
1020 75 46 67 31
2030 206 157 69 41
3040 157 216 52 33
4050 148 189 39 26
5060 130 139 15 15
6070 32 66 5 4
Total 748 813 247 150
Average age 38.19 41.27 31.35 33.85
SD age 13.66 13.26 12.61 13.17
Number of Dutch and American participants over gender
and age groups with their average age and standard deviation
(SD age).
1
Due to privacy reasons, the descriptions were deleted
directly after the participants finished the test. However, ana-
lysis of the length of the descriptions of a similar experiment
(Janssen et al., 2004) showed that participants on average used
10.49 words and 49.04 characters (no spaces) per description.
THE REMINISCENCE BUMP 3
did not have to be interesting, because we wanted
to prevent the participants describing major
events from their lives instead of those personal
events that first came to mind. They were not told
that they had to assign dates to these events,
because we did not want them to only describe
events they could easily date, such as birthdays or
holidays.
After completing a cued memory description,
participants were given a news question asking
when a certain well-known event happened. The
participants answered the question in ``calendar''
format (e.g., ``June 17, 1997'' or just ``1963'')
rather than in ``ago'' format (e.g., ``3 weeks ago''
or ``10 years ago''). The dates had to be specified
with drop-down lists. Prior research (Janssen,
Chessa, & Murre, 2004; Wright, Gaskell, &
O'Muircheartaigh, 1997) has shown that the tele-
scoping effect is smaller when the calendar-
answering format is used than when the ago for-
mat is used. When participants wanted to answer
that an event occurred in September 2002, they
had to select ``September'' and ``2002'' from
scroll-down menus, but they could leave the day
menu empty.
By alternating the recall of personal events and
the dating of news events we aimed to reduce the
use of strategies where participants might, for
example, use a single period as starting point for
all their personal memory searches. After com-
pleting the cued memory descriptions and news
questions, participants were presented with their
autobiographical memories one by one and asked
to date these, again using the calendar format.
Most participants took between 25 and 30 minutes
to finish the entire task.
RESULTS
The participants could take the Galton-Crovitz
test more than once, but in this paper we analyse
only the data of their first test. Answers referring
to dates in the future or to dates before the par-
ticipant's date of birth were also removed. There
was a significant difference between the reported
age of the news events and the age of the sub-
sequent personal events, M = 567.69 days,
t(15090) = 11.414, p < .001. Therefore, the news
events were not used as a starting point for the
searched period of personal memories. There was
a small overall backward telescoping effect, Mdn
= 1 day, t(7754) = 26.897, p < .001, in the order of
days for recent events and a larger overall forward
telescoping effect, Mdn = 7134 days, t(11531) =
711.733, p < .001, in the order of months for
remote events (also see Janssen et al., 2004).
The left panel of Figure 2 shows the empirical
probabilities of the ages of retrieved memories for
each age group over all the participants. Age bins
of 2 years were created. The proportion of mem-
ories falling in each bin is plotted. The prob-
abilities of recalled memories for the most recent
year are not shown because these probabilities are
much larger (between 0.43 and 0.66, fromoldest to
youngest participant age class) than for older
memories, and including them would obscure the
details of the age distribution. The left panel in
Figure 2 shows that participants in every age
group recall most memories from their recent
past. This can be explained from the character-
istics of memory storage, as participants generally
tend to forget more as the time between the
occurrence of a personal event and the recall
increases.
A reminiscence bump emerges from the data
for participants older than 40, for memories
formed, roughly, between ages 15 and 25. This
observation requires further investigation, since
the location of the reminiscence bump in prob-
ability distributions of memory age can be dis-
torted by the effect of forgetting. The Appendix
describes the mathematical details of our
approach, which removes this distortion. The
method separates initial memory encoding and
forgetting from the observed memory age fre-
quencies. Relation (3) in the Appendix between
memory age probability density, initial memory
encoding, and memory decline implies that the
empirical memory age probabilities and a com-
pletely specified decline function can be used to
estimate the initial encoding of a memory for
every participant age, up to a constant of nor-
malisation.
The encoding functions were estimated by
taking a memory decline function from our
Memory Chain Model, which gives a good
description of retention data on learning, forget-
ting, and amnesia (Murre & Chessa, 2004). In this
model, memory representations may be trans-
ferred over a sequence of neurobiologically
motivated ``memory stores'' that represent the
transformation of short-term memories (in sen-
sory stores, working memory) to long-term
memories (in hippocampus, neocortex, e.g.,
McGaugh, 2000). A summary description of our
model can be found in Chessa and Murre (2004).
Applications of the model to repeated learning
4 JANSSEN, CHESSA, MURRE
and forgetting of advertisements can be found in
Chessa and Murre (2001) and in Murre and
Chessa (2002). The decline function in our model
is a sum of exponential functions, each of which
describes memory decline in one of the memory
stores. Here we used a three-parameter function
that sums two exponentials, which in an analysis of
two dozen studies into long-term memory and
retrograde amnesia could be attributed to the
hippocampus and the neocortex (Murre, Chessa,
& Meeter, 2004).
The estimated encoding values for all partici-
pants, which are combined in the right panel of
Figure 2, clearly show a reminiscence bump in all
age classes. The bump can be distinguished better
there than in the empirical probabilities of mem-
ory age (left panel). Apart from the behaviour of
the estimated encoding for participants between
ages of 21 and 30, the shape of the encoding values
and the age at which the reminiscence bump
occurs are quite stable across the different age
groups. However, the difference in the maximum
encoding intensities between the age groups 4150
and 5160 is significant, F(4404, 3511) = 1.39, p <
.001, which also holds for the difference between
the age groups 4150 and 6170. These results
were found for each of the four participant groups
(i.e., Dutch and American, male and females). In
the right panel of Figure 2, we have also given a
fitted encoding function, which is identical for
each age group.
Subsequently, we derived a single encoding
function for each of the four participant sub-
groups, because we wanted to examine the effects
of gender and culture. The four functions were
obtained by averaging the encoding values over
the six age groups, which are weighted according
to the number of reported memories in each
group. The four subject-group encoding functions,
which are shown in Figure 3, are normalised such
that the encoding strength over the participant age
range sums to 1.
Some interesting observations can be derived
fromthe encoding functions in Figure 3. We found
that women reach their maximum encoding
(Mode = 13 + 0.50 yrs) earlier than men (Mode =
15 + 0.48 yrs). The intervals for the mode repre-
sent 99% confidence intervals, which also holds
for the intervals reported below. We also found
that Dutch participants reach their maximum
encoding (Mode = 15 + 0.38 yrs) earlier than
American participants (Mode = 17 + 0.75 yrs).
Further analysis showed that the maximum
encoding for American men (Mode = 17 + 1.27
yrs) occurs later than for Dutch men (Mode = 15
+ 0.51 yrs), while for American women (Mode =
13 + 0.92 yrs) it occurs earlier than for Dutch
women, although the exact location of the bump
is less sharp (Mode = 15 + 0.58 yrs). We also
investigated possible differences in the location of
the reminiscence bump between participants with
different levels of education. There appeared to
be no systematic differences for education for
each of the four participant groups.
Based on these findings, we formulated and
tested a probability distribution of memory age,
with density function denoted by f in the Appen-
dix. We fitted this distribution to the empirical
probabilities by combining the four estimated
overall encoding functions of Figure 3 with the
above-mentioned decline function according to
relation (3) in the Appendix. The model tested
assumes that: (1) the memory encoding function is
independent of education level and subject age
group, but may depend on gender and culture; and
(2) the memory decline function is the same for
each of the four participant groups (see Figure 4);
there are no results in the literature that evidence
different forgetting rates between men and
women and across cultures. The simultaneous fit
to 22 memory age distributionswe combined the
American 6070 years age group with the 5060
years group because of the small number of par-
ticipants in the former groupwas not rejected on
the basis of a composite chi-square test, w
2
(891, N
= 18,656) = 937.2, a > 0.1.
We also carried out the above analysis with a
three-parameter power law as decline function
(see Appendix), which has often been suggested
to fit different types of retention data (Rubin &
Wenzel, 1996). The above conclusions about the
reminiscence bump and initial encoding remain
the same. The only difference is that the power
law gives rise to higher encoding values after age
40 than the encoding functions in Figure 3.
DISCUSSION
Our experiment confirms the existence of the
reminiscence bump in the retrieved memories of
participants, as reported by Rubin et al. (1986).
We tested a large number of participants, who
used the same instructions and cue words. Our
study yields more accurate estimates for the age at
which the bump occurs, which we define as the age
at which the initial memory encoding has a max-
imum value. The bumps showed differences that
THE REMINISCENCE BUMP 5
Figure 2. Left panel: Proportions of retrieved memories as a function of participant age at the time of encoding for all the subjects.
Right panel: Estimated encoding values (dots). The fitted encoding function (solid lines) is a weighted average of the encoding values
for the four subject groups in Figure 3.
6
Figure 3. Estimated encoding values (dots), normalised to probability distributions, for each of the four participant groups, averaged
over the six participant age groups. The encoding values were fitted with a function (thick solid line) that was the sum of a common
component (dashed line) and a component specific to adolescence (thin solid line).
7
we find to be culture and gender dependent. We
found sharp reminiscence bumps for American
women and men at ages 13 and 17, respectively,
while Dutch participants show a more progressive
development of encoding strength around age 15.
The difference in encoding over time between
Dutch and American participants is in agreement
with the findings reported by Conway et al. (in
press) and Benson et al. (1992). Conway et al.
compared the distribution of memories of parti-
cipants from Bangladesh, China, England, Japan,
and the United States. Like us, they also found a
greater number of childhood memories among
American participants than in the other cultural
groups. Benson et al. compared the distribution of
memories of Japanese participants to the dis-
tribution of memories of American participants.
They found similar results. Their US sample
showed the greatest number of autobiographical
memories from their teens, whereas their
Japanese sample showed the most memories from
their twenties.
We did not find differences in the reminiscence
bump with respect to either participant age or
education level. The latter result implies that
people who left school at a younger age do not
show an earlier reminiscence bump than people
who left school at a later age. Furthermore, we
Figure 4. The decline function of the two-store Memory Chain Model that was fitted to the data of the four participant groups
simultaneously: (a) memory decline for retention lags until 5 years, (b) memory decline for lags between 5 and 70 years.
8 JANSSEN, CHESSA, MURRE
found evidence for the fact that people younger
than 40 years, like people older than 40 years,
show a reminiscence bump (Figure 2). This effect
usually goes unnoticed, because it is obscured by
the recency effect. When we inspect the encoding
values in Figure 2 further, the estimated encoding
shows a progressive increase with participant age
around the reminiscence bump for participants
older than 50. This means that the reminiscence
bump in older adults is stronger than in adults. We
observed this phenomenon in each of the four
participant groups.
Rubin et al. (1986) discuss four possible
explanations for the reminiscence bump phe-
nomenon. The first explanation is the differential
sampling hypothesis. Because of life review, peo-
ple recall events from a certain period more fre-
quently. The second explanation is the
differential encoding hypothesis. People encode
more memories more intensely at a certain age.
Therefore, the probability that these memories
are recalled is greater. The third hypothesis is the
differential encoding hypothesis based on mem-
orable events happening in certain calendar
years. In certain calendar years, more salient
events, such as wars, take place. Therefore, peo-
ple recall more events from those years. The last
hypothesis assumes that memory traces have
decreasing strength but increasing resistance as a
function of time.
The presence of the reminiscence bump in
young adults and the stronger reminiscence effect
in older adults suggest that two processes affect
the reminiscence bump phenomenon. First, events
in adolescence are encoded more strongly than
events that occur in other life periods (differential
encoding). Second, because these events are
initially stored more intensely, they will be
retrieved more frequently. Therefore, these
events will become even stronger at a later age
(differential sampling). The third and fourth
explanations can be rejected because the location
of the bump is determined by the age of the par-
ticipant and not by the calendar year or the age of
the memory.
Unlike prior experiments (Fromholt & Larsen,
1991; Hyland & Ackerman, 1988; McCormack,
1979), we did find gender differences, probably
because we analysed a larger participant sample.
Therefore, we could represent the results in
smaller age bins. The earlier age of the bump in
women may be attributed to earlier hormonal
changes in adolescence in interaction with socio-
cultural influences. To further explore such
hypotheses we constructed an equation that
decomposes the lifetime encoding function into
two components: a component that is common to
all participants (male or female, Dutch or Amer-
ican) and one that varies with gender and culture
(see end of Appendix). The best-fitting functions
are shown in Figure 3. The fitted functions differ
over the four groups only in the location of the
second component. The functions are helpful in
guiding the eye. We are well aware that their
theoretical contribution is very preliminary,
although testable in principle. The common
component may correspond with hippocampal
development and cholinergic processes in the
brain. The second component reflects the con-
tribution to the encoding of memories during
adolescence, possibly boosted by puberty hor-
mones, development of the self (Conway et al., in
press), and intense experiences (``first times'') that
happen during that period (Jansari & Parkin,
1996).
As the Galton-Crovitz test remains available
on our Internet site, we will continue to collect
and analyse new data in order to give more
accurate estimates for the age of the reminiscence
bump, in particular for participants from other
countries. It will then be possible to verify the
findings of Conway et al. (in press), who state that
the reminiscence bump is the same across cultures,
except for American participants.
Manuscript received 19 January 2004
Manuscript accepted 30 July 2004
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APPENDIX
In order to remove the effect of memory decline
from the empirical probabilities of memory age,
we take a formal framework of retention functions
for memory strength in time as a point of depar-
ture. Let memory strength be denoted by a func-
tion r that depends on time t since the time of
initial encoding. We denote the strength of initial
memory encoding by m and memory decline after
lag t by r (t). Memory strength after lag t, encod-
ing, and decline are related as follows in signal
detection theories of memory (Begg & Wick-
elgren, 1974; Wickelgren, 1975a, 1975b), and in
fluctuation theory and memory attribute models
(Murdock, 1974):
rt mr~t: 1
Expression (1) can give us an explanation and
description for the reminiscence bump in terms of
the encoding m. In order to illustrate our ideas we
introduce the following notation. Let z denote the
age of a participant at the time of testing. We
denote by w the age of a recalled memory at the
time of testing, which means that z w is the
10 JANSSEN, CHESSA, MURRE
participant's age at which the memory was enco-
ded. Expression (1) thus gives the following
expression for the strength of a memory at parti-
cipant age z, where the encoding may depend on
participant age:
rw mz wr~w: 2
The retention lag is, of course, equal to the
memory age w. The function r is a measure for the
lifetime of a memory, which can be normalised to
a probability density function or mass function
(pdf, for short). The age of a recalled memory
gives a lower bound for its lifetime. Up to a nor-
malisation constant, an expression for the pdf f of
memory age is given by
f w / mz w

1
w
r~tdt; 3
where the integral on the right-hand side follows
from the above-mentioned relation between
memory age and lifetime. We will not give tech-
nical details about the exact mathematical deri-
vation of this expression, but instead focus on
applying (3) in order to derive estimates of the
encoding m as a function of participant age z w at
the time of memory encoding.
If the decline function is a power law, which we
write as r~t t 1
a1
, where a > 0 denotes
the decline rate parameter, then relation (3)
becomes:
f w / mz ww 1
a
; 4
from which the encoding function m can be easily
derived. Instead of the above single-parameter
power law, we used the extended three-parameter
function bw 1
a
c, with b, c 0, alongside
the three-parameter decline function of our
Memory Chain Model.
The analytical expression for the encoding
function fitted in Figure 3 is the sum of the
``common component''
2a
1
1 e
bx

1
2

e
dx
; 5
where x k, and the ``adolescence component''
g expfx x
2
; 6
where x denotes participant age at the time of
memory encoding. Among the seven parameters
of the total encoding function, only x, the age at
which the adolescence component (6) is max-
imised, varies over gender and culture. The para-
meter in the first component (5) denotes the
period of childhood amnesia.
THE REMINISCENCE BUMP 11