Reminiscence Bump: Why Early Adulthood Is Often Remembered
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 12, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Memory & Forgetting · Written by Artificial Sapiens
The reminiscence bump is a well-documented tendency for people, especially adults over approximately age 40, to retrieve a disproportionate number of autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood. In studies asking about important life events, the concentration frequently falls around ages 10–30, with many memories from the twenties. The precise age range depends on how memories are elicited, the type of event, and the person or population studied. It is a statistical feature of the distribution of recalled experiences across a lifetime, rather than a universal rule about any particular individual's memory. A systematic review of 68 quantitative studies documents the phenomenon and the substantial variation among study methods.
The central question is why experiences from this period are often so accessible decades later. Investigators have proposed explanations involving novel experiences, developing cognitive abilities, the emergence of adult identity, transitions between life chapters, culturally shared expectations, and the way a question directs memory search. The most useful scientific account treats these as potentially interacting processes. Research increasingly emphasizes that the cue used during retrieval changes which part of a person's life appears to dominate. Koppel and Rubin's research review makes this methodological point especially clear.
What Is the Reminiscence Bump in Psychology?
Autobiographical memory refers to memory concerning one's own life. It includes specific personally experienced episodes, broad periods such as the years at a particular school, and knowledge about one's own history. The reminiscence bump is an unusually high frequency of retrieved events from youth and young adulthood when autobiographical memories are plotted against the age at which their original events occurred. It is often observed alongside two other broad features: relatively few recollections from the earliest years of life and many readily accessible memories from the recent past.
Imagine asking an older adult to tell you twenty important stories about their life. Their answers might include moving away from home, starting a career, encountering a close friend, becoming a parent, discovering a vocation, or leaving a difficult environment. A striking share might originate between adolescence and the late twenties. Another question, such as "What comes to mind when you hear the word window?" could produce many more recent and ordinary episodes and a somewhat earlier youth-related peak. Both patterns can occur in the same individual because the questions initiate different searches of memory.
The phenomenon is defined by disproportionate representation, not by an absolute count of preserved recordings. Researchers typically assign remembered events to the age at which they occurred, aggregate responses into age intervals, and examine the resulting distribution. Every methodological decision—participant age, cue type, number of events requested, available life periods, and bin width—can influence the resulting shape. The systematic review by Munawar, Kuhn, and Haque synthesizes this methodological diversity.
At What Ages Does the Reminiscence Bump Occur?
The familiar summary is "roughly ages 10 to 30," especially for salient autobiographical events in adults remembering much later. Scientific findings justify a more exact formulation: important-memory prompts, neutral word cues, and imagined cultural life scripts produce distributions with different typical locations. The 2018 review reported approximate intervals of ages 10–30 for important memories, 5–30 for word-cued memories, and 6–39 for life-script studies. These are summary ranges from heterogeneous studies, not confidence intervals or diagnostic thresholds.
A review of more than fifty studies reported that average reported bump boundaries were approximately 9 and 23 years for word-cued memory studies, compared with approximately 15 and 28 years for studies eliciting important memories. The same review notes that olfactory cues can produce a still earlier concentration. Those contrasts show why a chart labeled simply "the reminiscence bump" needs to specify what the participants were asked to remember.
Age grouping introduces further complexity. When memories are grouped into five-year rather than ten-year intervals, a peak can become visible in a younger age band that the coarser grouping concealed. The phrase "early adulthood" in the title thus captures a prominent part of the effect, while adolescence and sometimes later childhood belong in the scientific explanation. Individuals can display more than one peak, and a single person's responses are not guaranteed to match an aggregate curve.
How Researchers Discover the Bump
Word-cued autobiographical memory
In the classic word-cue procedure, a participant encounters ordinary words such as tree, house, or book and reports a personal experience that comes to mind. The researcher then asks when the episode happened. Because an ordinary word can evoke mundane or consequential episodes, this method samples an associative route into personal memory. It is widely used in the tradition of the Galton–Crovitz cueing method.
This task tends to elicit many recent events in addition to the youth-related peak. Recall is influenced by language, cue associations, event accessibility, and the precision with which respondents can date an experience. The method is often described as relatively open-ended, but it should never be interpreted as a perfectly unbiased census of everything the brain retained. A large Internet study of nearly 3,500 participants found that a word-cued bump could not be reduced to events rated as particularly novel, emotional, positive, negative, or important. See Janssen and colleagues' study.
Important and self-defining memories
Other researchers ask for one's most important, vivid, or identity-defining events, or for scenes that belong in a book about one's life. Such requests explicitly select experiences with narrative significance. They are especially likely to recruit memories of first commitments, meaningful transitions, long-lasting relationships, personal accomplishments, and turning points. Their bump often lies later than the one generated by word cues.
This difference matters because it separates two possible questions: "Which experiences remain available?" and "Which experiences do I select when I tell the story of myself?" A bump in the latter task can reflect the organization of a life story as well as the accessibility of particular episodes. Research on life chapters and cultural life scripts supports examining those organizing structures directly.
Music, odors, public events, and other cues
Music can reconnect a person with a developmental period, an earlier relationship, or a social scene. In a 2023 cross-national study, 4,824 respondents from 102 countries recalled songs and described their personal connections to them; the study examined music-related reminiscence patterns across age and context. Musical preferences and memories are related but not interchangeable outcomes. A favorite song's release year, the age it was first heard, and the date of the remembered episode may differ.
Odors often bring back earlier childhood experiences. The cue-comparison review describes evidence that odor-cued memories concentrate earlier than verbal and important-memory reports. Public events can also yield cohort-related concentrations, but the recall of a historical event depends on how prominent it was for that generation. A study comparing public events and personal events found that important public events were dominated by particular historical episodes rather than showing exactly the same age pattern as important autobiographical memories.
Why Do We Remember Adolescence and Early Adulthood So Often?
Several explanations identify real characteristics of the period and of later remembering. The scientific task is to test which mechanisms explain the distributions under different conditions, rather than to assume one theory explains every curve. The 2018 systematic review found substantive support for narrative or identity accounts and cultural life-script accounts, while emphasizing mixed findings and methodological heterogeneity.
Novelty, first experiences, and distinctive transitions
Many people encounter important "firsts" in adolescence or young adulthood: independent travel, serious relationships, leaving school, beginning a profession, living independently, or navigating a new social role. A distinctive experience may receive attention, be rehearsed repeatedly, and offer many later retrieval cues. Developmental transitions also divide a long life into chapters with identifiable starting points.
The intuition is plausible, but the evidence is mixed. The large word-cue study by Janssen and colleagues did not find that its youth bump was simply composed of unusually novel, emotional, or important events. Other studies using more structured life-story recall have found that bump-period memories were rated as more novel, identity-relevant, or linked to developmental transitions. The contrast suggests that novelty can contribute to some forms of autobiographical recall without serving as a complete explanation.
Identity formation and the personal life narrative
Early adulthood frequently involves commitments about relationships, work, beliefs, community, and the kind of person one wants to become. Events associated with these commitments acquire meaning through repeated interpretation and retelling. A memory from this period can answer more than "What happened?": it can also answer "How did I become who I am?"
Narrative and identity explanations propose that the emerging adult self organizes and repeatedly revisits certain events, strengthening their position in the person's life story. In one study, participants aged 52–66 recalled thousands of events after their lives were divided into age intervals; memories from the bump period were more closely associated with identity development and life transitions. See the life-story account study. This evidence concerns the relationships among memory content, perceived meaning, and recall patterns; it does not demonstrate that identity processes explain every bump or that a life has only one identity-forming period.
Cultural life scripts
A cultural life script is shared knowledge about which major life events are expected to occur, and approximately when they usually occur, in a culturally recognized life course. Graduation, marriage, parenthood, employment, and other transitions may be represented within such scripts, with the expected sequence and importance varying across settings.
When people are asked for their most important life events, these expectations can guide what comes to mind. They may also encourage rehearsal and social storytelling about events perceived as milestones. This explanation has a particular strength: it connects individual remembering with the culturally available structure of a life story. Research on cultural life scripts and life chapters offers empirical evidence for their contribution.
A cultural script is a population-level pattern, not a prescription for how a life should unfold. Many lives depart substantially from majority expectations. In research on surprising and unexpected memories, bumps appeared for some unexpected experiences as well, showing that culturally expected milestones are not the sole source of the phenomenon. The theory is especially relevant to important and positive life events and should be tested differently for ordinary word-cued recollections.
Cognitive maturation and early adult functioning
Some accounts suggest that developmental changes in cognition influence encoding, organization, or retention during youth and early adulthood. Abilities relevant to memory change across childhood and adulthood, and some cognitive functions perform strongly in young adulthood. From this perspective, experiences from the period might be encoded or retained especially effectively.
That explanation remains incomplete on its own. It does not readily account for why the age of the peak shifts so much between odor cues, word cues, and requests for important life events. It also risks treating a complex collection of cognitive capacities as a single global memory ability with one peak age. Koppel and Rubin argue that cue-dependent changes place strong constraints on simple encoding-only or maturation-only accounts. Neuroscience contributes possible mechanisms, but the reminiscence bump is primarily defined by behavioral distributions, and no single identified brain process explains it fully.
Retrieval strategies and selective reconstruction
Remembering is an act of retrieval in the present. A cue such as "first love," "my most important decision," or "a smell from childhood" organizes the search differently. A request for one's "five most important experiences" implicitly promotes a life-story hierarchy, while the word "window" can activate ordinary episodes through loose association.
Researchers therefore distinguish explanations emphasizing what happened during encoding from explanations emphasizing how memories are selected later. In a provocative experiment, participants imagined the autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old and generated distributions resembling those observed in actual older adults. The imagined-memory study shows that shared knowledge and retrieval schemas can produce a bump-like pattern even without the imagined person's genuine experiences. It strengthens the case for retrieval organization, although the resemblance of distributions does not establish that real memories are fictional or that encoding has no role.
The Three-Part Shape of Lifetime Autobiographical Recall
A simplified distribution frequently includes comparatively sparse recall from early childhood, an elevated youth or young-adult interval, and a strong concentration of more recent memories. Each feature may arise through partly different processes.
The scarcity of memories from the earliest years is associated with the developmental phenomenon commonly studied as childhood amnesia. The abundance of recent recollections is consistent with many memories becoming less accessible as time passes and with the immediate availability of current-life cues. The reminiscence bump is noteworthy because it creates a local increase for much older experiences, despite the general advantage of recent events.
This shape is descriptive rather than universal. Recent memories may dominate a word-cue task; important-memory tasks can emphasize past turning points; autobiographical recall after unusual historical circumstances may show other peaks. An individual's graph also depends on how much time they spent in each age interval and how many events they were asked to provide. Understanding general human memory helps place the bump in a broader discussion of encoding, retrieval, and accessibility without confusing it with a universal forgetting curve.
Are Memories From the Bump More Accurate or More Vivid?
A higher chance of recalling something does not demonstrate that it was encoded with exceptional accuracy or preserved unchanged. Autobiographical remembering reconstructs an episode using remembered elements, contextual knowledge, current perspective, and information acquired afterward. Rehearsal can preserve useful details while also reinforcing later interpretations.
Vividness, emotional intensity, certainty, and objective accuracy should therefore be assessed separately. Some important youth memories are vivid because they have been frequently revisited or retold; others are fragmentary and difficult to date. One investigation of life-span recollection found that changes in reported reliving and vividness did not explain the reminiscence bump's overall distribution. The study on vividness and reliving is a reminder that a memory's felt intensity is not a complete mechanism for why it is retrieved.
A person may confidently remember the atmosphere of a graduation yet confuse which relative attended, the exact year, or words spoken. These variations belong to the general science of reconstructive memory; the specific ownership of this article remains the age distribution of recall. A discussion of why personal recollection can change over time is appropriately grounded in episodic memory and related memory-accuracy research.
Why Positive Memories Often Show a Stronger Bump
Studies requesting highly important or personally meaningful events often find an especially pronounced youth bump for positive memories. This result is consistent with cultural life scripts that concentrate expected positive milestones in young adulthood and with the frequent retelling of highly valued experiences. But the pattern is task dependent, and negative experiences also shape identity and autobiographical narratives.
In Dickson, Pillemer, and Bruehl's experiments, the bump was particularly clear for positive material, yet unexpected events could also produce a concentration. A 2023 study of African American and European American adults likewise found earlier bumps for word-cued memories than important memories and stronger youth concentrations for positive than negative events in the studied samples. These findings should be interpreted as group results; they do not imply that a person's negative life experiences become unimportant or intrinsically less memorable.
Negative recollections can also be structured by turning points, social context, and current concerns. A 2024 five-study investigation addressed positive and negative personal, public, and music-related memories and considered cultural contrasts. The nature of a question, the category of events, and the meaning given to a memory jointly matter more than an unqualified claim that people remember only the happy years.
Culture, Gender, Generation, and Life Circumstances
The reminiscence bump has appeared in research across multiple cultural settings, but this does not establish one fixed age, one universally shared life script, or one identical interpretation. Cultural expectations about education, marriage, work, caregiving, migration, and adult independence can change the events given narrative prominence. Within one society, cohort history and family circumstances can produce very different routes through adulthood.
A large Internet-based comparison of U.S. and Dutch respondents reported some differences in memory distributions across countries and genders, while also finding youth-related peaks. The age, gender, education, and culture study demonstrates why demographic patterns should be evaluated empirically rather than assumed. The 2023 cross-cultural study within the United States similarly reported modest differences while retaining a clear distinction between cue types.
A 2025 Czech and Slovak study examined the relationship between shared cultural life scripts and personally reported turning points, finding a concentration of positive life-story memories between about ages 15 and 30. It also distinguished the perceived transitional impact of script-consistent positive events from that of individually distinctive negative events. This illustrates a productive modern direction: researchers can analyze cultural expectations and real personal transitions together.
Migration, displacement, major loss, a career restart, or a new relationship can generate later chapters with high autobiographical significance. The hypothesis that such transitions can create additional retrieval concentrations is plausible, but it requires data specific to the population and retrieval method. A person's life story may contain several formative periods, and science should leave room for that individual variability.
The Reminiscence Bump in Music and Popular Culture
People sometimes feel that songs from their teens or twenties have a unique capacity to transport them backward. Music can serve as a cue to relationships, places, repeated routines, and the social identities of a generation. It can also be heard many times, which complicates efforts to decide exactly when a memory originated.
An international music study involving 4,824 participants documented music-related reminiscence effects while exploring country, age, and genre. A 2024 study of Beatles-related recollections distinguished directly experienced music memories from memories transmitted through later shared experiences. Such work demonstrates that the remembered age of an event, the artist's release date, and the listener's current emotional attachment measure different things.
A memorable song can activate an autobiographical episode from a much earlier period even when the song continues to be played in later decades. A music-preference peak should not be relabeled as direct proof of more accurate episodic recall. The scientific value of musical research lies in showing how cues, identity, exposure, and collective culture interact over time.
What the Bump Reveals About the Self
The memories a person retrieves when asked "Tell me who you are" tend to be organized by themes and turning points. Adolescence and early adulthood often supply an influential set of such turning points. Recounting them helps people connect present commitments to past decisions and recognize continuity in their lives.
Yet a remembered event can acquire new meaning long after it happened. A youthful failure may become the beginning of a later career; an ordinary encounter may become significant after a relationship develops. These interpretive changes help explain why a period becomes prominent in a narrated life story without requiring every memory from it to be privileged at original encoding.
A recent 2024 study of self-defining memories in older adults found a recognizable age distribution while also reporting differences by theme and emotion. This suggests that self-relevant remembering is a promising bridge between identity theory and the measurement of lifetime memories, with variation that deserves attention rather than a single simplified peak.
Is the Reminiscence Bump Caused by Aging?
The bump is easiest to measure when enough later life has elapsed to compare the adolescent years with several subsequent decades. That is why many classic studies recruit middle-aged or older adults. It is a feature of lifetime recall observed at a particular testing age, rather than an illness caused by aging.
Normal differences in how people recall their life stories can appear even when daily memory is functioning well. The finding does not predict whether a person will develop a neurocognitive disorder. Nor does a weak or absent bump in an informal conversation mean that someone has a medical condition. Clinical memory evaluation considers broader symptoms, daily functioning, history, standardized procedures, and relevant medical factors; those topics have their own clinical canonical owners.
If memory difficulties are persistent, progressive, disruptive to ordinary activities, or accompanied by other concerning changes, individualized professional assessment is more informative than comparing personal recollections with a reminiscence-bump chart. A sudden change in confusion or neurological function calls for urgent medical assessment. The bump itself is not a screening tool.
Can the Reminiscence Bump Occur Later in Life?
The classic distribution concerns a relatively early stretch of the life course, but people can experience later upheavals, reinventions, and meaningful turning points. A second marriage, emigration, recovery from major adversity, or the birth of a child at a later age may become central to a person's account of their life.
Such examples make good psychological sense under life-chapter and identity explanations. However, a later emotionally important period is not automatically evidence of a second reminiscence bump as defined in population studies. To demonstrate a second bump, researchers would need a systematic age distribution and a specified retrieval task, ideally compared with an appropriate baseline.
The distinction matters because memorable individual events and statistically elevated age periods operate at different levels of analysis. Autobiographical memory is personally meaningful; a reminiscence-bump claim is a statement about patterned retrieval across many experiences and usually many people.
Reminiscence Bump, Nostalgia, and Reminiscence Therapy
The reminiscence bump describes when remembered events originated. Nostalgia refers to a complex emotion or experience related to a personally meaningful past. Reminiscence is the act of recalling or talking about earlier experiences. These concepts intersect when music, photographs, conversations, and anniversaries reactivate memories from a salient life stage.
Reminiscence-based activities may support conversation, social connection, and life review, but the bump itself is not an intervention and provides no guarantee that selecting memories from youth produces a therapeutic benefit. Any claims about the efficacy of a particular clinical intervention require intervention-specific evidence, participants, outcomes, and appropriate comparators.
Likewise, a person who repeatedly recalls early adulthood should not automatically be characterized as living in the past. The act may serve ordinary storytelling, identity continuity, shared history, or enjoyment. Its personal meaning depends on context and cannot be inferred from the age of the memories alone.
What the Evidence Does—and Does Not—Establish
The existence of a reminiscence bump in many studied autobiographical memory distributions is a well-supported observation. Evidence also strongly supports the importance of retrieval instructions: word cues generally bring an earlier, smaller youth bump than prompts for important life events, and odor cues may bring an earlier one still. Cross-cultural studies suggest both broad regularities and meaningful variation.
The mechanisms remain a multi-theory research question. Cultural life scripts and autobiographical identity have empirical support, while novelty, rehearsal, maturation, and life-story organization may contribute under some conditions. The strongest limitation on a single-factor account is the reproducible variability across cueing methods. A bump obtained from a particular task should not be treated as a direct count of all stored memories from every life period.
Much evidence comes from retrospective self-report. People can misdate experiences, blend repeated episodes, reinterpret earlier events, or respond in socially expected ways. Studies differ in age ranges, cultural sampling, event categories, survey instructions, and statistical grouping. The systematic review reported considerable heterogeneity, meaning its age ranges summarize diverse designs rather than prove one universal quantitative parameter. Contemporary studies continue to refine cue effects, cross-cultural meaning, and the distinction between salient and ordinary memories.
Everyday Examples: How the Effect Appears
A person in their sixties may remember a first apartment with unusual clarity because it marked independence and appears repeatedly in family stories. Another may spontaneously recall a childhood kitchen when smelling a familiar spice. Someone else can name numerous songs from high school but struggle to associate each song with a specific dated event. These examples illustrate distinct retrieval routes: autobiographical significance, sensory association, and music-linked familiarity.
A thirty-five-year-old may find that recent family life dominates the memories available on demand; a seventy-year-old may select distant turning points when asked to narrate the major chapters of life. Neither observation establishes a universal shift in memory ability. The question asked and the person's goals in answering it can change the apparent distribution.
A practical way to appreciate the research is to try two separate reflection prompts: first list ordinary personal episodes suggested by random neutral words, then list a handful of the events that most shaped your life. Compare the ages of the memories you selected. Such an exercise demonstrates how different questions guide your own recollection; it is a personal illustration, not a standardized experiment or a test of memory health.
Common Misinterpretations
"We store more memories between ages 15 and 30 than at any other time."
Research primarily measures what people retrieve when asked, rather than directly measuring how many traces exist in the brain. Retrieval access, life-story selection, frequency of rehearsal, and different event categories all influence the observed curves. Statements about storage quantity therefore exceed the evidence.
"The reminiscence bump is identical in every country."
Similar patterns appear in multiple populations, but methods, age ranges, and culturally prominent events vary. Cross-cultural studies support investigating both shared features and local life scripts rather than declaring one universal distribution.
"These memories are the most accurate."
An older memory can feel vivid and self-defining while still containing dating errors, missing details, and reconstruction. Frequency of recall is not a validated measure of accuracy.
"Only happy memories produce the bump."
Positive events often show a particularly marked bump under important-memory instructions. Negative, surprising, and transitional memories also occur; their distributions depend on event category and method.
"The bump proves that all cognition peaks in the twenties."
The bump is a retrieval phenomenon with several competing explanations. It cannot establish a single peak age for global cognitive functioning.
"If I recall my twenties often, something is wrong with my memory now."
The bump is a common pattern of autobiographical recall in adulthood and is not a diagnosis. Evaluation of concerning current memory changes requires an appropriate clinical approach.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a simple definition of the reminiscence bump?
It is the tendency for adults to recall a disproportionately large number of personal memories from adolescence and early adulthood compared with adjacent, more distant life periods, especially in studies asking for important autobiographical events.
What is the typical reminiscence-bump age range?
The familiar shorthand is about 10–30 years old, but word cues, important-memory prompts, cultural life-script tasks, and sensory cues produce different intervals. There is no scientifically justified single age range that fits every task or person.
Why do older adults remember their twenties so well?
The twenties often contain meaningful transitions and events woven into an adult life narrative. Cultural expectations, repeated storytelling, distinctive experiences, and the way a question directs retrieval can all contribute. Scientific reviews have not identified one sufficient explanation for every result.
Does the bump begin in childhood or adolescence?
Many studies find some of the concentration during adolescence, and some word- or odor-cued tasks produce even earlier peaks. Its position is partly a property of the measurement method.
Is the reminiscence bump the same as childhood amnesia?
No. Childhood amnesia refers to the scarcity of accessible autobiographical memories from the earliest years. The reminiscence bump refers to an elevated share from a later developmental period. Both influence the age distribution of life memories.
Why do songs from high school feel especially meaningful?
Songs can become associated with repeated social experiences, relationships, emotional events, and emerging identity. Music-related bumps have been studied internationally, but music preferences and the dating of episodic memories are different measurements.
Is the reminiscence bump linked to first love?
Relationship milestones can be prominent within identity narratives and cultural life scripts. That makes them plausible contributors to important-memory distributions, but no particular relationship experience is required for the bump.
Are the memories from the bump unusually vivid?
Some are vivid and frequently rehearsed, but evidence does not support explaining the entire bump through vividness. A memory's vividness and its historical accuracy are separate questions.
Do different cultures have different bumps?
Studies document broad youth-related patterns alongside modest or substantial variations by cue, sample, culturally expected transitions, and historical cohort. Researchers should compare methods before attributing differences solely to culture.
Does everyone experience it?
No population-level regularity guarantees an identical individual pattern. Personal history, age, retrieval cues, and the kinds of experiences requested can affect whether an individual report displays a recognizable peak.
Can there be a second bump later in life?
A later period can contain many meaningful memories, but establishing an additional population-level peak requires systematic study. An individual cluster of important later-life recollections is not sufficient evidence of a second formal bump.
Is the reminiscence bump a sign of dementia or memory loss?
No. It is a normal, well-studied pattern in autobiographical memory research. Clinical concerns require evaluation of functioning and symptoms rather than a comparison with this curve.
Can I use the effect to improve my memory?
The research can inform how personally meaningful cues and life-story structure influence recall. It does not validate a universal memory-enhancement exercise or establish that remembering youth improves general memory performance. Claims of training benefit need separate controlled outcome studies.
Is it a proven explanation that the brain is at its best at age 20?
No. The cognitive-maturation account is one proposed contributor. The cue-dependent movement of the bump is particularly difficult to explain by a single fixed physiological peak.
What is the strongest current explanation?
A combination of narrative identity, culturally structured life events, and retrieval strategy has substantial support, with novelty, rehearsal, and other cognitive processes relevant in some settings. The different age distributions produced by different cues indicate that a comprehensive account must explain retrieval selection as well as characteristics of the original experiences.
Related Articles
The wider framework is developed in Autobiographical Memory: How We Remember Our Lives. Readers interested in the specific recollection of events can continue with Episodic Memory: Definition, Examples, and Research. The broad taxonomy appears in Human Memory: Types, Processes, and How It Works.
References
Akhtar, S., Conway, M. A., Justice, L. V., & Morrison, C. M. (2024). In my life: memory, self and The Beatles. Memory, 32(3), 296–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2024.2314510
Coleman, J. T., Janssen, S. M. J., & Belli, R. F. (2023). A cross-cultural investigation of the reminiscence bumps for important personal events and word-cued autobiographical memories. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 37(5), 919–937. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4090
Cuervo-Lombard, C.-V., Fritsch, A., & Voltzenlogel, V. (2024). Self-defining memories in older adults: Distribution across lifespan and characteristics of the reminiscence bump. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics Plus, 1(3), 100030. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aggp.2024.100030
Curci, A., Battista, F., Lanciano, T., d'Ovidio, F. D., & Conway, M. A. (2024). The reminiscence bump and the self: Evidence from five studies on positive and negative memories. Memory, 32(6), 757–775. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2024.2325522
Demiray, B., Gülgöz, S., & Bluck, S. (2009). Examining the life story account of the reminiscence bump: Why we remember more from young adulthood. Memory, 17(7), 708–723. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210902939322
Dickson, R. A., Pillemer, D. B., & Bruehl, E. C. (2011). The reminiscence bump for salient personal memories: Is a cultural life script required? Memory & Cognition, 39, 977–991. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-011-0082-3
Janssen, S. M. J., & Murre, J. M. J. (2008). Reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory: Unexplained by novelty, emotionality, valence, or importance of personal events. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(12), 1847–1860. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470210701774242
Janssen, S. M. J., Chessa, A. G., & Murre, J. M. J. (2005). The reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory: Effects of age, gender, education, and culture. Psychological Science. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16076679/
Janssen, S. M. J., Rubin, D. C., & St. Jacques, P. L. (2011). The temporal distribution of autobiographical memory: Changes in reliving and vividness over the life span do not explain the reminiscence bump. Memory & Cognition, 39(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-010-0003-x
Koppel, J., & Berntsen, D. (2015). The reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory and for public events: A comparison across different cueing methods. Memory. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2014.985233
Koppel, J., & Berntsen, D. (2016). The reminiscence bump without memories: The distribution of imagined word-cued and important autobiographical memories in a hypothetical 70-year-old. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27376837/
Koppel, J., & Rubin, D. C. (2016). Recent advances in understanding the reminiscence bump: The importance of cues in guiding recall from autobiographical memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25, 135–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721416631955
Munawar, K., Kuhn, S. K., & Haque, S. (2018). Understanding the reminiscence bump: A systematic review. PLOS ONE, 13(12), e0208595. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208595
Renwick, J., & Woolhouse, M. H. (2023). Reminiscence bump invariance with respect to genre, age, and country. Psychology of Music, 51, 1349–1365. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356221141735
Štěpánková, L., & Ježek, S. (2025). Transitional impact of important life events among Czechs and Slovaks. Memory, 33, 1217–1229. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2025.2557961
Thomsen, D. K., & Berntsen, D. (2008). The cultural life script and life story chapters contribute to the reminiscence bump. Memory, 16, 420–435. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210802010497