Older adults recall disproportionately many memories from adolescence and early adulthood, more than from the years either side.
Plotting autobiographical recall against age of the event produces a reliable excess for roughly ages ten to thirty. Competing explanations include the density of first-time events, the formation of identity, and a cultural life script that tells people which events belong in a life. The bump appears for public events and preferred music as well as personal episodes.
In practice
- A company's founding decade is described in far more detail than the profitable decade that followed.
- The music a person considers best was released while they were between fifteen and twenty-five, in almost every generation.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind