We found a reminiscence bump in adolescence (peaking around age 14) for both ratings of the autobiographical salience of songs featured in the charts during that period and the familiarity of these songs

A Cross-Sectional Study of Reminiscence Bumps for Music-Related Memories in Adulthood. Kelly Jakubowski et al. Music & Science, October 23, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204320965058

Abstract: Music is often intimately linked to identity, as evidenced by the high value many people place on musical activities and the way in which music can become seemingly effortlessly coupled to important memories from throughout one’s lifespan. Previous research has revealed a consistent reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory—the disproportionate recall of memories from between ages 10 to 30 years in comparison with other lifetime periods—which also appears to extend to music-related memories. The present study represents one of the largest explorations of the musical reminiscence bump across adulthood to date. Participants (N = 470; ages 18 to 82 years) were shown the titles and artists of 111 popular songs that had featured in the charts between 1950 and 2015 and rated the degree to which they had autobiographical memories associated with each song, as well as the degree to which they were familiar with and liked the song. We found a reminiscence bump in adolescence (peaking around age 14) for both ratings of the autobiographical salience of songs featured in the charts during that period and the familiarity of these songs. Liking ratings showed more divergent results depending on a participant’s current age, including evidence for a cascading reminiscence bump, in which liking ratings from young adults increased for music from their parents’ adolescent years. We also revealed new evidence that music-related autobiographical memories appear to invoke similar retrieval processes to the common methodology of eliciting autobiographical memories via word cues. We contextualize these results in relation to general theoretical accounts of the reminiscence bump, and age-related differences in the bump are discussed in relation to various sociocultural and technological changes in music listening habits.

Keywords: Aging, autobiographical memory, musical memory, music-evoked autobiographical memory, reminiscence bump

Discussion

In this article, we investigated the reminiscence bump for popular music from across a 65-year period (songs featured in the charts from 1950 to 2015) in participants across the full range of adulthood (ages 18 to 82 years). This represents one of the largest investigations of the musical reminiscence bump to date and, to our knowledge, the first extensive exploration of this phenomenon in the French population.

We found consistent evidence for a reminiscence bump for two aspects of the songs used here: ratings of the degree to which the songs evoke autobiographical memories, and familiarity ratings for the songs themselves. Reminiscence bumps for these two dependent variables were evidenced in all four age groups. The results for autobiographical salience ratings of the songs were broadly aligned with general theoretical conceptions of a reminiscence bump that occurs between ages 10 to 30 years (Rubin et al., 1998). The familiarity ratings exhibited largely the same response pattern as the autobiographical salience ratings, but the familiarity bump in the two middle age groups began somewhat earlier than expected (around 5 years before participants were born, although this result was statistically significant following correction for multiple comparisons only for the 42–55 age group). This suggests that songs that featured in the charts just before participants were born continued to be popular for some time beyond their initial release, and also demonstrates that the correspondence between the year a song is featured in the charts and the year at which a participant is first/most often exposed to it are not always equivalent. This result parallels the findings of Rathbone et al. (2017), who measured both age at release and age at which a pop song was rated as most important, and found the average age at release to be approximately 5 to 6 years earlier than the average age at which songs were rated as most personally important to participants.

We also found some slight variations in the reminiscence bump between age groups. The peak (highest point) in the bump for the oldest age group for both autobiographical salience and familiarity ratings was 5 years later than the other age groups. It is possible that this represents a cohort effect; for instance, the oldest age group may have engaged with music in different ways during adolescence than the younger groups as a result of both sociocultural and technological factors, causing them to discover their most autobiographically salient music later in their teenage years. It could also be that the bump may shift its peak later in time as people age (and potentially reengage with the music of their youth in different ways across the lifespan), such that the three younger groups may eventually show a similar pattern when they reach the age of the oldest group. Another notable difference between the four age groups was that the youngest group showed a less pronounced reminiscence bump (lower peak) than the other three age groups. This aligns with previous literature showing a stronger reminiscence bump effect in older than younger adults (Janssen et al., 2005). This may be related to reengagement with favorite music over the course of a lifetime, which can strengthen the link between the music and associated memories via regular retrieval and rehearsal (see also the work of Janssen et al., 2007 on memory re-sampling effects, which are stronger for music than other cultural products, such as films and books).

The youngest group showed evidence of a cascading reminiscence bump for music released up to two decades before they were born. This bump we found here is similar, although slightly earlier in time, in comparison with the bump occurring 8 to 12 years before participants were born reported by Krumhansl and Zupnick (2013). This difference may be partially attributed to the fact that the average maternal age is approximately 2 years older in France than the US,² but could also reflect some cultural variations in music listening habits or sharing of music between generations. In our study, the cascading reminiscence bump was particularly evidenced in higher than average liking ratings for music from this period, which were even higher than for current music, that is, music of the participants’ own reminiscence bump period. It would be interesting to follow up this finding in longitudinal research, for instance, to test whether this cascading reminiscence bump is maintained throughout a participant’s lifetime, or whether liking ratings for current pop music might increase as these young participants age and begin to look back on this period in a more nostalgic light. Future cross-sectional research could also compare how younger versus older adults respond to music released before they were born, as the present design primarily allowed for this particular factor to be investigated in the youngest two groups.

In general, liking ratings showed the least consistent evidence of a reminiscence bump. This was particularly due to differences between the two oldest and two youngest groups—the two oldest groups showed liking responses that were more consistent and more correlated with their autobiographical salience and familiarity ratings than the two youngest groups. These dissimilarities in liking ratings could be related to generational differences in the way people engage with music. For instance, younger adults tend to listen more to music via streaming and online services in comparison with older adults, which might allow for access to a wider range of music in terms of its release date, in comparison with older groups who more often make use of CD collections (Krumhansl, 2017). If young adults are listening to a broader array of music from across many decades,³ this may increase their openness to music from different eras and result in less varied liking ratings across the songs used in this study. The effects of such shifts in listening methods and technologies on the formation and lifetime stability of the musical reminiscence bump have yet to be fully explored. The results presented in Figure 4 also show evidence of some intergenerational shared preferences, with the three youngest groups all giving their highest liking ratings for music from the late 1970s to early 1980s, indicating that particular stylistic conventions or features of the songs themselves may also play a notable role in shaping preferences for the pop songs presented in this study.

Finally, we found that the reminiscence bump for autobiographical salience ratings of the songs aligned relatively well with previous findings on the reminiscence bump for autobiographical memories evoked via word cues. The results of our analysis presented in Figure 5 indicate that songs featured in the charts during adolescence are more likely to elicit strong autobiographical associations in older adults, peaking around age 14. Adolescence is a key period in terms of identity development (e.g., Erikson, 1956; Meeus, 2011), and previous research also suggests that musical tastes are developed around this period (Holbrook & Schindler, 1989; Lamont & Loveday (2020); North & Hargreaves, 2002). However, Holbrook and Schindler’s (1989) findings indicate that musical preferences peak for music released around age 24, suggesting that the reminiscence bump in music-related autobiographical memories may not be entirely explained by the crystallization of musical tastes. Our analysis also contributes the novel insight that the shape of the music-related reminiscence bump is well-characterized by a gamma distribution, which has implications for future research in terms of informing sampling decisions and making more precise assumptions about the predicted associations between age and music-related memories.

The comparatively earlier reminiscence bump evidenced for both music- and word-related memories indicates that the associative retrieval processes underlying these two tasks are accessing a somewhat different set of memories than the top-down retrieval method of asking participants to recall particularly important memories. Such findings are important for informing the development of interventions that aim to elicit memories via specific types of retrieval cues. For instance, this finding suggests that using musical or word cues to elicit memories in people with Alzheimer’s disease might be particularly effective for bringing back memories from adolescence. The “important memories” method may be less effective in this population in general, due to the impairments in strategic retrieval that are common to this disease. Therefore, it is important to investigate whether other associative cue types, beyond music and word cues, may be found to be effective in eliciting memories from other lifetime periods (e.g., early adulthood), or whether, on the other hand, all associative retrieval tasks show a bump in the same temporal location. Studies that compare autobiographical memories evoked by different cue types across the same sample of participants using the same data collection protocol should be conducted as a matter of priority, in order to ensure the differences in the reminiscence bump location seen here cannot be attributed to methodological differences between studies.

In general, further research is needed to isolate the mechanisms underlying these different types of retrieval tasks, and theoretical accounts of the reminiscence bump require revision to incorporate explanations for these differences in temporal location of the bump. In particular, the majority of existing theories provide a more sufficient explanation for memories accessed via the “important memories” method than via word cues or music (Koppel & Berntsen, 2015). It should also be noted that our analysis of the word-cued reminiscence bump gave some indication that there may actually be two bumps in the word-cued memories distribution (see Figure 5). An initial comparison of the studies producing earlier versus later word-cued bumps does not reveal any systematic difference in methodology; rather, it may be that the cue word method invokes several possible retrieval strategies, including a combination of both top-down and associative processes that may vary from one participant or one cue to another.

Future research on this topic should further compare the methods of soliciting ratings of songs via visual presentation of the title to auditory presentation of the song. In particular, our method can be potentially useful in clinical settings in which family or carers may be asked to select personally-relevant music to be used with patients from a written song list; as such, it is of both theoretical and practical importance to fully explore any potential limitations of this method. Our study is based on the assumption that a song title can elicit phenomenologically similar autobiographical memories to hearing the song, following the results of Cady et al. (2008). An additional important finding from Cady et al. (2008) is that seeing the song title and hearing the music both elicited a high degree of mentally “hearing” the song during the subsequent autobiographical recall task, which did not significantly differ between these two retrieval conditions. It is likely that the approach used in the present study also elicited a high degree of musical imagery for the songs whose titles were presented, although this factor was not explicitly measured. Subsequent research should investigate the degree to which musical imagery mediates the relationship between being presented information about a song (e.g., title, printed lyrics) and subsequent retrieval of autobiographical memories associated to that song. This is particularly important for understanding how different types of retrieval cues may affect the retrieved memory content and differentially impact the shape and temporal location of the reminiscence bump.

Our study has followed a similar approach to most previous research in this domain by focusing solely on popular music, which we acknowledge represents only one of many genres of music that may be autobiographically relevant to participants. In addition, technological advances such as music streaming services now offer researchers the opportunity to monitor and measure the listening histories of participants, which may be utilized to map the relationship between date of first exposure, number of total exposures, and the autobiographical salience of a song in a more precise manner than ever before (see Stephens-Davidowitz, 2018, for an initial exploration of the popularity of songs on Spotify by age and gender of the listener). Online streaming frequency or number of radio plays of particular songs, for instance, may also be used as proxy measures for likelihood of familiarity with a song, although such figures may be more representative of certain demographic groups than others (e.g., Spotify usage in particular is still skewed toward younger adults)⁴.

In conclusion, the results of this study indicate the presence of a reminiscence bump in adolescence for both the familiarity of songs featured in the charts during that period and ratings of the autobiographical salience of these songs. Evidence for this bump was found consistently across participants currently aged 18 to 82 years. Liking ratings showed more divergent results depending on the participants’ current age, with evidence for a cascading reminiscence bump, in which liking ratings from young adults increased for music of their parents’ generation. We also revealed new evidence that music-related autobiographical memories appear to invoke similar retrieval processes to the common methodology of eliciting autobiographical memories via word cues. These findings contribute to both theoretical and practical discussions around the extent to which music is intrinsically linked to personal memories from throughout the lifespan, and provide further impetus for exploring the efficacy of music to cue vivid autobiographical memories in everyday and clinical settings.