| When asked to recollect personal memories from their past, older individuals disproportionately recall experiences from adolescence and young adulthood. This cache of recollections, called the bump, has proven tantalizingly robust, extending across several different methods of data collection. In this study, a free recall measure was used to investigate whether the bump endures into the ninth decade and beyond, to further test its resilience to instructional modification, and to determine if there are gender differences in the distribution. Subsidiary hypotheses tested the role of life cycle factors (age, education), personality (tender-mindedness and assertiveness), and memory (episodic and working memory). Guided by theories proposed to account for the bump, multinomial logistic regression was used in cross-sectional analyses of data from the 1994--1995 (n = 199) and 2000--2002 (n = 230) panels of the Long Beach Longitudinal Study. Results were substantially consistent across the experiments for two of the three primary research questions. A bump of memories emerged for participants 80 years and older that was statistically indistinguishable from the bump generated by those 55--79 years of age, and participants writing about people produced older memories than those writing about events and decisions. However, while there was evidence of a bump among men across both panels, among women the phenomenon emerged in only one of the data sets. Also, there was some indication that older participants may be more likely to produce memories from childhood and the bump than subsequent adulthood, and that more tender-minded individuals may be more likely to produce memories from adulthood than the bump. |
