Speaker 6: David C. Rubin
Sunday December 19, 10:00 - 11:00
The Reminiscence Bump in Autobiographical Memory
David C. Rubin
(Department of Experimental Psychology, Duke University, United States)
Evidence is reviewed that for older adults the period from ten to thirty years of age produces recall of more autobiographical memories than would be expected from a monotonically decreasing retention function. It also produces the most vivid memories, and the most important memories. It is the period from which peoples’ favorite films, music, and books come and the period from which they judge the most important world events occurred. Factual, semantic, general-knowledge, multiple choice questions about public events from this period are answered more accurately. Thus, adolescence and early adulthood are special times for memory encoding. It is when people come of age, a time when their place in society is formed, a time of identity and generation formation, the time for which they have the most nostalgia. A cognitive theory based on the importance of transitions and several non-cognitive theories are considered as explanations of this pervasive phenomenon.
Having established a ten-to-thirty-year-old bump in memory and preference from published data, recent studies from several laboratories will be considered that extend those findings. In a study of very long term memory for popular music, older adults listened to excerpts of popular songs drawn from across the 20th century. They then gave emotionality and preference ratings, and tried to name the title, artist and year of popularity for each excerpt. Older adults’ memory, preference and emotionality ratings were highest for songs from their youth.
In another set of studies, people who emigrated as adults from Spanish speaking countries and then spent at least 30 years in an English speaking area were asked to provide autobiographical memories to word cues. All communication was in Spanish on one day and English on a second. The increase in memories followed the age of immigration and settlement, rather than being at a fixed age, supporting a cognitive theory of the reminiscence bump. Memories cued in Spanish and English showed similar distributions and reaction times, but the distribution of those memories specifically identified as having been recalled internally in Spanish or English followed the relative use of the recalled language over the lifespan. This research supports the claim that bilinguals have ‘separate linguistic stores’ for the mental representation of autobiographical events. Similar work with Poles who immigrated to Denmark provides converging evidence and extends the Spanish ?English research in important ways.