The reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory: Effects of age and culture

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The reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory
Effects of age and culture Steve M. J. Janssen
Jeroen Raaijmakers University of Amsterdam
s.m.j.janssen_at_uva.nl
We investigated the age distribution of
autobiographical memories with the Galton-Crovitz
cueing method through the Internet. Participants
from different countries, such as Australia,
Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, U.K. and U.S.,
were presented with ten cue words. They were
asked to recall personal memories that were
associated to the cue words and to date these
personal events. We were able to remove the
recency effect from the empirical age
distributions with a method that allows separate
estimation of memory encoding and forgetting. We
found strong evidence for a reminiscence bump
in all subpopulations at all ages. Participants
store more events (or they store events better)
between the ages five and twenty-five than at
other ages. Specific personal events were stored
best when participants were ten years old. We
found only small differences between the
distributions of participants from different age
groups and different cultures.
When one asks participants to date events, one
has to be aware of the telescoping effect.
Participants tend to displace recent events
backward in time, whereas they tend to displace
remote events forward in time (Janssen et al., in
press). To examine this telescoping effect,
participants were also asked to date ten
well-known news events, which we selected from
the Daily News Memory Test (Meeter et al., in
press). The Galton-Crovitz test was presented on
the Internet in Dutch and English,
http//memory.uva.nl. For this presentation, we
only analyzed the results of Dutch (N 6453) and
Belgian (N 245) participants, who took the
Dutch version, and the results of American (N
937), Australian (N 85), British (N 222) and
Canadian (N 113) participants, who took the
English version. The Dutch participants were the
eldest (M age 42.57 yrs, SD 14.77), whereas
the British participants were the youngest (M age
31.60, SD 12.19).
First, we divided the six subpopulations into
eleven age groups of five years, ranging from
16-20 until 66-70. For each age group, we
calculated the distribution of personal events as
a function of the age of the participant at the
occurrence of the event. Then, we calculated one
retention function for all age groups in each
subpopulation, based on the last five years. We
divided the distribution of memories by the
retention function, leaving an encoding function
for each age group. We normalized the encoding
functions and, finally, averaged these functions
to one encoding function for each subpopulation.
We found that the encoding function for the
subpopulations were similar. All functions
peaked, when the participants were ten years old.
However, the Anglo-Saxon participants recalled
relatively more personal events from the period
between 6 and 10, whereas the Dutch and Belgian
participants recalled more personal events from
the period between 12 and 28. We also averaged
the encoding functions of participants between 16
and 35 (i.e., young adults), between 36 and 50
(i.e., adults), and between 51 and 70 (i.e.,
elderly) for the period that they were all
between 0 and 36 years old. The young adults
recalled relatively more memories from the period
that they were between 6 and 10 than the adults
and elderly, whereas the elderly recalled
relatively more memories from the period that
they were
In this experiment, we investigated the age
distribution of autobiographical memories. We
obtained personal events from participants by
presenting them ten cue words. We asked them to
describe briefly the first specific personal
event that came to mind. After the participants
had described ten memories, they were asked to
date these personal events. This method is called
the Galton-Crovitz cueing method.
between 20 and 26 than the young adults and
adults. Currently, we expanding the website with
Japanese, Italian and Portuguese versions of the
Galton-Crovitz test, because the Dutch and
English culture are, perhaps, too similar.
Janssen, S.M.J., Chessa, A.G., Murre, J.M.J.
(2005). The reminis-cence bump in
autobiographical memory Effects of age, gender,
culture and education. Memory, 13 (6),
658-668. Janssen, S.M.J., Chessa, A.G., Murre,
J.M.J. (in press). Memory for time How people
date events. Memory Cognition. Meeter, M.,
Murre, J.M.J., Janssen, S.M.J. (in press).
Remembering the news Modeling retention data
from a study with 14,000 participants. Memory
Cognition.