Reminiscence Bump

The reminiscence bump is the tendency for adults over the age of forty to recall a disproportionate number of autobiographical memories from their adolescence and early adulthood, a pattern identified by plotting the age at which people encode the memories they later recall onto what researchers call the lifespan retrieval curve. That curve shows three broad phases: childhood amnesia from birth to about age five, the reminiscence bump itself for memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, most commonly placed around ages fifteen to twenty-five though different studies place its edges anywhere from eight to twenty-seven depending on how memories are cued, and a period of ordinary forgetting after that bump and before the present. The effect has been reproduced across a range of study conditions, and researchers have proposed several explanations for it, ranging from changes in brain biology with age to the particular kinds of formative, novel events that tend to occur during that stretch of a person's life.