Doin' the Reminiscence Bump

The reminiscence bump is not a dance step, but a characteristic of autobiographical memory—our recall of our own life history. While you might expect memories to fade gradually with time, previous studies of older adults show better recall for events during their youth, between the ages of 10 and 30. One way to test this is with popular music. In studies in which participants listen to hit songs from before they were born to the present, they are more likely to recognize and prefer songs from their teens and twenties, with the bump peaking at age 23.5. Reminiscence bumps have also been found for films, books, sports figures, current events and personal memories.

It won't be a surprise to music fans that we show a lifelong preference for the songs of our youth. The audience for oldies shows consists mostly of people who were in high school or college at the time the music was originally popular.

Several explanations have been suggested for the bump. One possibility is that we had many vivid first-time experiences during late adolescence and young adulthood, which were encoded in memory more strongly due to their emotional content. The first experience of a given type may also become a prototype, which is more easily recalled than other members of the category. It has also been suggested that hormonal and neurobiological changes play a role.

In a new study by Krumhansl and Zupnick, 62 Cornell University students with an average age of 20 were played clips from the two top hits of every year from 1955 to 2009 in random order. They were asked whether they recognized each song, whether they liked it, and to rate its quality. They indicated whether they had personal memories of each song, and if so when and with whom they heard it. Here are the results for recognition, quality, liking and personal memories.

These students are too young to test for the reminiscence bump. Their better recall for songs released after 2000 has a trivial alternative explanation—that more recent songs are better remembered. However, there were “cascading reminiscence bumps”—two earlier, smaller bumps, which are seen most clearly in the recognition and personal memories data. One occurs at from 1980-1984, about the time their parents were 20, and the other in the '60s, the decade when most of their parents were born.

The obvious explanation for the 1980-84 bump is that as children and adolescents, we are exposed to out parents' favorite music and wind up liking some of it. (My parents were fans of big band music. I didn't care much for big bands when I lived at home, but I've gradually come to like them much better—a sleeper effect?) The authors suggest that the '60s bump could reflect the musical taste of the students' grandparents. They also entertain the hypothesis that '60s music is generally better known and of higher quality than the music of other decades—a claim I regard as suspect.

Krumhansl and Zupnick also asked their participants what genres of music they listened to while growing up and now. Of course, their sample was neither large nor representative of college students generally, but here are the results.

Neither jazz nor blues did well—a problem for the future of both genres. I was prepared to see them overshadowed by pop, rock and hip-hop, but they also did worse than classical, country and soundtracks! (Of course, in recent years, the more popular soundtracks have been collections of recent hits, rather than original music composed for the film.)

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