Cultural Life Script TheoryĪ 'life script' can be defined as the occurrence of typical and culturally expected events at a predicted time in one’s life. The events, experiences, and knowledge were encoded for that specific period to last longer in memory. At that time, individuals have better cognitive and neural functions to learn, process, and retain information. Cognitive Abilities AccountĪccording to cognitive abilities theory, the brain’s maturation reaches its peak from adolescence to young adulthood. Thus, events experienced in adolescence and young adulthood are easily recalled and remembered. Many life events are experienced for the first time at a young age. According to studies, first-time experiences and unique events are more likely to be remembered vividly later in life. Scientists investigate the same question and come up with some relevant theories: Cognitive AccountĪccording to cognitive theory, novel experiences are more memorable, and the novelty is stored in the memory. Then the next question would be, 'WHY?' Why does everybody have better memories of their younger ages? Reminiscence Bump TheoriesĪs mentioned above, the reminiscence bump is a robust finding that all individuals experience. People tend to remember memories from their early ages, including happy and valuable memories related to families, relationships, education, and work. In reminiscence studies, people are asked to freely call upon their memories, or experimenters give them cue words and ask them to recall a memory about that. People only show reminiscence bumps for positive, significant life events. Interestingly, sad and traumatic memories are not included in the reminiscence bump. The phenomenon is known as a 'reminiscence bump.' : The findings of reminiscence bump are consistent across autobiographical research all people over the age of 30 have better memories of their adolescence to young adulthood period. Older people indicate increased memories of events from their 10 to 30 age range. People over 30 years old tend to remember certain parts of their lives more vividly in the lifespan recall curve. Second, the recency effect indicates that individuals recall memories of recent events easily, but the frequency of these kinds of memories decreases naturally over time (4). From the ages of 0 to 8, there is a limited recollection of autobiographical memory (3). This article will focus on the reminiscence bump, but let’s quickly look at the first two phenomena.įirst, childhood amnesia refers to not remembering the early years of life. Three interesting phenomena have been discovered in studies on autobiographical memory: Autobiographical memories are created and evaluated according to socio-cultural practices. Īutobiographical memories are sophisticated combinations of individual, recurring, and societal memories that create the story of the self. Self-related memories are also called 'autobiographical memories'. People encode and recall personal, social, and historical events as social beings.

Human memory is more complex than the memory processes of different species. Memory is a process that is more diverse in human beings than in other species. Long ago, memory had a survival effect on humans because they lived in caves and more dangerous environments than now. Otherwise, this memory loss could end their lives. In nature, animals must remember their predators in order to run away from them. For some species, memory has a survival value. All living beings have a memory to continue their lives.

Infantile amnesia refers to