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In My Life: Memory, Self and The Beatles 
 
Shazia Akhtar1, Martin A Conway †, Lucy V. Justice3, & Catriona M. Morrison4 
 
1Department of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire 
†Department of Psychology City University of London 
3School of Sciences, Nottingham Trent University 
4 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nottingham, Ningbo China  
 
 
 
 
 
 
Address correspondence to: 
Dr. Shazia Akhtar 
School of Life and Medical Sciences 
Department of Psychology 
University of Hertfordshire 
College Lane 
Hatfield 
AL10 9AB 
Email: S.Akhtar8@herts.ac.uk 
 
Keywords – memories, reminiscence bump 
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Abstract 
In a large-scale study we asked people for their memories of The Beatles. Over four thousand 
respondents completed an online questionnaire. The memory could be related to a song, 
album, event, TV, film, or even a personal encounter. Respondents judged the age at which 
the event remembered had occurred and rated the memory for vividness, emotional intensity, 
valence and rehearsal.  We found 38% of the memories were classified as ‘seeing The Beatles 
live’, 25% ‘buying Beatles music, 20% ‘love of The Beatles’ and 17% of the memories were 
‘listening to Beatles songs with other people’ – what we refer to as cascading memories. 
Among the younger respondents (aged 26 and under), 84% of the memories were cascading 
in nature. The memories dated to what we term the ‘self-defining period’ in autobiographical 
memory (previously termed ‘the reminiscence bump’), with a mean age-at-encoding of 13.6 
years, which is consistent with other studies of memories associated with music. We propose 
that these memories reflect the formation of generational identity (Mannheim, 1952). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Introduction 
Autobiographical memory encompasses memory for personal experiences as well as 
knowledge of the self, and consequently, is critical for personal identity and a functioning 
self-system (see Conway, 2002; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; McAdams, 2001, for 
reviews). One interesting aspect of this is the frequency of the recall of autobiographical 
memories across the lifespan that shows an unusual rise in memories dating to when the 
rememberer was aged about 10 to 30 years. This has been termed the ‘reminiscence bump’ 
(RB) by Rubin, Wetzler and Nebes (1986) but this, however, is an atheoretical term simply 
referring to a characteristic of a graph and, moreover, not consistent with the thinking of the 
original discoverer of the RB, Fitzgerald and Lawrence (1984), who considered it to reflect 
aspects of the self.  
In order to better capture this particular relation between memory and self it has also 
been coined the ‘self-defining period’ (SP) in autobiographical memory (Loveday, Woy, & 
Conway, 2020). The central idea here is that the content of memories dating to the SP are 
more likely to be novel, making them more memorable (Pillemer, 2001). Of course, it could 
be that these memories are better encoded, especially during this time of optimum 
neurobiological maturity of the memory system, which improves during one’s childhood 
(Howe 2013), but then declines throughout one’s adulthood (Henson et al., 2016).  
Cultural life scripts have been attributed to the reminiscence bump. For example 
Bernstein and Rubin (2004) asked undergraduate participants to imagine an ordinary infant; 
name the seven most important events that was most likely to take place in the life of this 
imagery infant, as well as indicating at what age the events were likely to occur, rating the 
events prevalence, importance, and valence. Their findings revealed the reported events were 
mainly positive normative life events such as graduation, marriage, falling in love. 
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Interestingly, their findings revealed the expected age of occurrence of positive events were 
rated to occur during early adulthood (in line with the RB), whereas the age of occurrence of 
negative events were rated as happening at any time in life. Their findings were replicated 
widely (Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008; Bohn & Berntsen, 2008; Collins, Pillemer, Ivcevic, & 
Gooze, 2007; Erdog ̆an, Baran, Avlar, Tas ̧, & Tekcan, 2008; Glu ̈ck & Bluck, 2007; 
Habermas, 2007, Study 2; Rubin, Berntsen, & Hutson, 2009; Thomsen & Berntsen, 2008) 
and concluded life scripts provide an alternative explanation to the reminiscence bump. 
For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on the ‘self-defining period’ of 
autobiographical memory. During this period, the content of memories often relate to stages 
of development, in particular Erikson’s psychosocial stages (1982 – see Conway & Holmes, 
2004, for an early investigation of SP memories and psychosocial stages). The main 
psychosocial stages dominating the period are those of identity, intimacy. The identity stage 
refers to a period of identity formation, where an individual establishes personal goals that 
endure for many years or even the whole lifespan. Whereas the intimacy stage refers to the 
formation of intimate personal relations. The main task of the identity stage, which precedes 
intimacy, although as these are ‘fuzzy’ developmental stages there is inevitably some overlap, 
is as the name clearly suggests the formation of an individual identity. Essentially the 
emergence of an individual self from the years of childhood. There are many ways in which 
this takes place, however, one we want to focus on here is the identification of the emerging 
adult self with events and experiences that occur outside the family. It is the identity stage 
that we will be mainly concerned with in the present study. It is, perhaps important to note 
that that the peak of the SP, in terms of average number of memories recalled occurs at 
different points or ages in the SP for different methods of eliciting memories, to different 
cues, and for different classes of memories (see Loveday, et. al, 2021, and Munawar, Kuhn, 
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& Haque, 2018 for a recent reviews). In other words the peak of the SP is variable within the 
period itself. 
The generational identity occurs when a person knows that they are part of a 
particular social subgroup that may be for example a social movement, political group or 
religious group, where they share common goals, ideas and experiences (Conway, 1997). As 
such, according to Erikson, knowledge during this phase is encoded in a priviledged way, 
compared to knowledge encoded at later points in the life cycle. Importantly, knowledge 
retained during this period may form the basis of autobiographical memory structures which 
are added to over the entire lifespan and remain highly accessible. 
There are many domains that the adolescent self might identify with, from politics to 
sport, and so help to define or establish individuality. However, one area that has grown in 
interest over the years, is that of music, particularly popular music. Music by its very nature 
is related to an individuals’ sense of personal and cultural identity (e.g., Bryant, 2005; Van 
Dijck, 2006). Holbrook and Schindler (1989) were the first researchers to show a preference 
for music in the SP. In their original study 108 participants rated 28 popular songs released 
between 1932 and 1986. Their finds showed preference ratings peaked for songs that had 
been released at the age of 24 years. This finding has been replicated in Hemming, 2013; 
Janssen et al., 2007; Krumhansl, 2017. However, other studies e.g. (Cady et al., 2008; 
Schulkind et al., 1999) have tended to use very specific cues such as song titles and/or 
excerpts from songs to retrieve autobiographical memories. There findings revealed these 
autobiographical memories are higher in specificity, vividness, and emotionality. Rather 
interestingly, Rathbone et al. (2017) showed that the SP for music was highly associated with 
personal significance of the song and as such argue that there is an explicit link with identity 
and self that cannot be explained only by age-related encoding. 
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Related to this, studies conducted by EI Haj et al., 2012, 2013 – showed that music 
evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMS) were not only attached to important periods of 
one’s life but these MEAMS were spontaneously retrieved, contained more emotional content 
and episodic detail. EI Haj et l., 2012 &2013 and later conformed by Krumhansl (2017) 
concluded if music can play an important role in to access, reinforce, and share memories, 
this offers a potential explanation as to why people are drawn to music in the SP period.  
Krumhansl and Zupnick (2013)  study was the first to show that music transmitted 
from generation to generation shapes autobiographical memories, preferences and emotional 
responses, which they refer to as cascading reminiscence bumps.  These researchers, 
investigated the reminiscence bump for autobiographical memories, quality judgements and 
emotional reactions in 20-year olds compared with the music experiences of their parents. 
According to the authors, the young participants showed a typical increase for music ratings 
and music-evoked autobiographical memories for songs released during their parents’ first 
two decades of life. Thus, music experiences in the home environment seem to function in 
terms of a musical cultural transmission over generations in terms of ‘cascading reminiscence 
bumps’. 
The studies outlined above have tended to use very specific cues, in contrast, in our 
work, we have often tried to use very general cues or even no cues at all (Loveday, et al., 
2020). Here we explored free recall of music in a naturalistic setting – participants were 
instructed to select eight pieces of music that they would like to keep with them should they 
be sent to a place of isolation – a desert island. The main findings revealed that half of all 
selections were shown to have been most important between the age of 10 and 30 years. 
Strikingly, the reasons for their selections was because of the song’s link to memories of a 
person, period, or place. Our reasoning for using such general cues is that if an SP is found 
using these more general, less specific ways to elicit autobiographical memories, a sort of 
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‘spontaneous’ SP, then this is even stronger evidence for this relation between memory and 
self.  
Some years ago we had a unique opportunity to conduct a large scale web-based 
survey of people’s memories of The Beatles. This was linked to the annual meeting of the 
British Science Association (BSA) whose 2008 meeting was held in the City of Liverpool. It 
was suggested to us by the BSA Psychology Section, that a wide-ranging survey of memories 
related to the Beatles might be a good way to celebrate the annual meeting and to make it 
more relevant to the general public of Liverpool.  
There were responses across a wide range of ages and from many different countries, 
which was what we had hoped for. The BSA has extensive media coverage and the 
questionnaire and web site were widely advertised. We made a number of hypotheses for the 
present study: 
Following our earlier reasoning we expected that people would have most strongly 
identified with the group, their music, movies, television appearances, etc. when they were in 
their early adolescence. We predicted that this would be manifest in an SP largely covering 
the age range of early adolescence with a peak recall somewhere in this age range, making it 
earlier than the peaks observed in SPs cued in other ways, which typically are later than early 
adolescence (Loveday, et. al, 2020).  
We also predicted that the majority of memories would be ‘field’ memories: a 
memory that preserves something approximating to a person’s original point-of-view during 
the experience that is remembered, rather than an observer memory: a memory in which the 
person sees or observes him/herself. Our rational for this, is that field memories are  
associated mostly with re-experiencing the phenomenological features of the original event, 
accompanied by a high degree of vividness and recollective experience (Akhtar et al., 2017). 
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Further, specific and detailed memories are more likely to be recalled with field perspective 
(Berntsen & Rubin, 2006; D’Argembeau et al., 2003; McIsaac & Eich, 2002, 2004; Nigro & 
Neisser, 1983; Sutin & Rubin, 2010). Finally, in line with Krumhansl and Zupnick (2013) we 
expected for those younger participants who take part in this study, to have  autobiographical 
memories that have been transmitted from one generation to the other, and thus show a 
cascading effect. 
 
Method 
Respondents  
There were 4039 respondents who completed the survey. Inspection of the memory 
descriptions led to 141 responses being judged unusable because the memory description was 
vague and lacked (any) specificity, 391 memories were taken out of all the main analysis as 
these were negative memories associated with the death John Lennon rather than with the 
Beatles. Thus, a total of 3507 respondent memories were used. 1727 (49%) were from female 
respondents and 1780 (51%) were from male respondents. Respondents had a mean age of 
48.01 years (SD 13.3) and were recruited from 84 different countries (see Appendix).  
Ethical approval was obtained by the University of Leeds, and all study procedures were 
carried out in accordance with the British Psychological Society guidelines and the 
Declaration of Helsinki. 
Materials and Procedure 
The questionnaire was accessed via a web link to a bespoke online survey 
(www.magicalmemory.com- - no longer available) and was widely reported in the 
international media. The questionnaire began with an information page outlining key 
 
1 This study was conducted in 2008, thus the mean age of the participants today would be 64 
years. 
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instructions regarding the nature of the memory to-be-sampled, an informed consent box to 
be checked, and collected minimal demographic data (age, gender, nationality).  Respondents 
were also informed that after recalling their memory they would be asked to answer some 
questions about the memory. For these questions they were instructed not to guess or infer 
answers but to only answer if they actually remembered the answer.  
 
They then moved to the next page of the questionnaire proper. They were instructed to 
recall and then type a description of the first memory to come to mind that was associated 
with The Beatles. The memory description was to be about a paragraph or so in length. The 
memory itself had to be one that they were certain they remembered. The memory could be 
associated with a song, album, event or a personal encounter. After entering the memory 
description, they were then asked to enter, in years, the age they believed they were in the 
memory to the nearest year – what we labelled the Age at Encoding (AaE). Following this, 
the respondents answered a series of questions regarding the recollective qualities of the 
memory: (1) whether or not they liked The Beatles (2) the era of the memory, (3) how vivid 
was their memory, (4) how emotionally intense was their memory, (5) How negative/positive 
their memory was, (6) how rehearsed was their memory and finally (7) their memory 
perspective: approximating your original point-of-view or from an observer perspective in 
which you ‘see’ yourself in the memory. Responses to this question were optional and if 
respondents felt they could not make this judgment they left the boxes unchecked. Questions 
1,3,4,6 and 7 were on a 5-point scale, where 1=low, 3=moderate, and 5=high, intermediate 
numbers were used for more fine-grained answers. Question 2 had 5- response options: ‘the 
60’s’, ‘the 70s’, ‘the 80s, ‘the 90s’, and ‘2000’s’ and question 5 had response options: 1=very 
negative, 2= negative, 3= neutral (low emotion) 4=positive and 5 = very positive. 
 
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Results 
All analyses were run in R version 3.6.2 (R Core Team 2019). All data and R code is 
available on request to the corresponding author. 
 
Descriptive statistics 
The means (and standard deviations), medians (and median absolute deviations) and counts 
(and percentages) of questionnaire items are shown in Table 1. 
INSERT TABLE 1 HERE 
 
Age at Encoding 
The mean Age at Encoding (AaE) was 13.6 years, SD = 6.92 (median = 13, MAD = 4.45), 
the distribution is shown in Figure 1.  
 
INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE 
 
To understand if AaE changed as a function of respondent demographics and recollective 
measures we used a linear model with AaE as the outcome variable, fitted with a lognormal 
distribution. Respondent age, gender, nationality, vividness, emotional intensity, valence, 
rehearsal and perspective taken were entered into the model as fixed effects. Note that the 
data collected contained respondents from 84 different nationalities, of which only three had 
n > 100 (English: 1267, American: 823 and Canadian: 267). We therefore collapsed the data 
into two groups: British (including English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh) and the rest 
of the world. The amalgamation of groups has both statistical and theoretical justification. 
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Statistically, the two collapsed groups contained more even numbers of respondents (British: 
1425, rest of world: 2082) allowing for more robust estimates to be made. Theoretically, we 
assumed that there might be differences in memory recall between British respondents and 
others due to The Beatles being a British group, emerging in an era when North American 
music prevailed in pop culture, so for a British band to explode onto the pop music scene was 
quite revolutionary. Further, it has been argued that The Beatles caused a sea-change in 
British culture (Kureishi, 1991). 
 
We found a reliable effect of AaE and respondent age, such that AaE increased with age. 
Vividness and emotional intensity were also found to reliably increase with AaE whilst there 
was a reliable negative relationship with AaE and valence, such that as AaE increased 
memories became marginally more negative. However, for all reliable predictors effect sizes 
were found to be very small. Gender, nationality, rehearsal and perspective taken did not 
have reliable relationships with AaE. Model results are shown in Table 2 and effects of 
reliable model are shown in Figure 2; figures of predictors without reliable effects are shown 
in the appendix for completeness. 
 
INSERT TABLE 2 HERE 
 
INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE 
 
Memory Perspective 
In line with previous findings (Akhtar, Justice, Loveday and Conway, 2017; Nigro and 
Neisser 1994), 79% of the memories were rated as field memories and 21% of memories as 
observer. We investigated differences between age, gender and recollective measures of field 
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and observer memories using a binary logistic regression with recollective measures entered 
into the model as fixed effects and memory perspective included as the outcome. 
 
INSERT TABLE 3 HERE 
 
Results, shown in Table 3, revealed that the probability of recalling a memory with a field 
perspective increased with age, and that field memories were associated with higher levels of 
vividness and rehearsal than observer memories. Gender, emotional intensity and valence 
were not reliable predictors of perspective taken. Figures of the effects of the reliable 
predictors are shown in Figure 3, figures for the effects of the non-reliable predictors can be 
found in the appendix 
 
INSERT FIGURE 3 HERE 
 
Memory Content 
The whole corpus of memory descriptions was analysed using the Alceste Software for 
statistical analysis of textual data. The software bridges quantitative and qualitative methods, 
analysing natural language using multivariate statistical methods to identify groups of words 
that reliably cluster together across different contexts, i.e., phrases and sentences. Alceste 
conducts an analysis of the co-occurring lexemes within simple statements of a text and is 
based on Benzecri’s (1981) contribution to textual statistics.2 Analyses were performed on 
the whole data corpus, yielding a linguistic profile. This showed that 38% of the memories 
 
2 Full details can be found at: http://www.image-zafar.com/Logicieluk.html 
 
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were classified as ‘seeing The Beatles live’, 25% ‘buying Beatles music, 20% ‘love of The 
Beatles’ and 17% of the memories were ‘listening to Beatles songs with other people’.  
 
In a separate analysis we were interested in the phenomenon of cascading memories, 
music transmitted from generation to generation in the younger respondents in the study 
(Krumhansl, 2017). We analysed the memory content of the younger respondents (26 years 
and below). There were 486 memories in this group. The analysis performed on this data 
corpus revealed 54% of the memories were of listening/singing to Beatles music with 
respondents’ parents in the home, 30% of the memories were of listening/singing to Beatles 
music with respondent’s schoolteachers and 16% of the memories were listening to Beatles 
music with respondent’s friends/siblings. Thus 84% of memories from the younger 
respondents was transmitted from generation to generation – showing the cascading effect 
(Krumhansl, 2017).  
 
  
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Positive Nature of Memories 
The majority of memories in this study were all very positive in nature. We used 
computerised text analysis programme Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, 
Booth, & Francis, 2007) to count the number of words associated with measures such as 
‘positive emotion’, ‘negative emotion’, ‘sad’ and ‘anxious’. The analysis revealed more 
positive emotional words were used in the memories compared to negative emotional words, 
such that only 8.35% of the memories contained ‘sad’ words, 3.1% of the memories 
contained ‘anger’ words and 2% of the memories contained ‘anxious’ words. Finally, when 
respondents were asked to rate their memory valence, 81% of respondents rated their memory 
4 or 5 indicating very emotionally positive memories. In sum the majority of memories 
collected in this study were positive memories associated with the Beatles. 
 
Discussion 
Respondents in this study were asked to list a specific memory of an event associated 
in some way with the 1960s pop group The Beatles. As predicted the majority of these 
memories dated to when respondents were 10 to 20 years of age. This spontaneous 
emergence of the self-defining period (SP) is striking and unusual as the only, general, 
memory cue was ‘The Beatles’. Here we consider the nature of the observed SP, the qualities 
of the memories, and the role of variables such as age, culture, and the set of ‘cascading’ 
memories that were also found. 
 
The Self-Defining Period and Autobiographical Memories 
 
Our original conjecture, based on findings by Loveday et. al, (2020) and also on 
earlier work, e.g. Conway & Holmes (2004), was that the SP would be marked by an increase 
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in the recall of memories from this period. A secondary and more tentative hypothesis was 
that the peak of this rise in the spontaneous recall of Beatle-related memories would date to 
some point in early adolescence. Our reasoning was that the SP relates to a period of identity 
formation that occurs after childhood and is one of the hallmarks of (early) adolescence. The 
two main psychosocial tasks that characterise this period are the formation of an identity that 
includes, social groups, society and culture generally as well as the formation of important 
personal relationships. Our proposal was that evidence of both these psychosocial stages 
would be found in autobiographical memories freely recalled from age ranges in which these 
developments of self were considered to occur. In fact, we found little evidence of memories 
dating to the later intimacy stage (late ’teens to early 20s) but, and as predicted, powerful 
evidence of freely recalled memories dating to the identity formation stage. The mean AaE 
here was 13.6 years and showed no difference for women and men. Memories of different 
AaE were distributed around this mean, with a positive skew, and had a standard deviation of 
about 7 years (see Figure 1). In our view these autobiographical memories in many ways 
define the SP for identity. Taking this one step further we suggest that memories from this 
period contribute to the representation of generation identity in long-term memory 
(Mannheim, 1952, see too Conway, 1997). 
 
In Mannheim’s (1952) original concept, generation identity is not defined by age but 
rather by the social groups one identifies with. Thus, it is by no means the case that only 
those in early adolescence have a SP associated with aspects of The Beatles. As our data 
show younger people (not alive at the time of The Beatles) may have cascading memories 
dating to The Beatles-related events (largely songs played to them by their parents). 
Similarly, older people, past the psychosocial stage of identity formation in early adolescence 
at the time of The Beatles may, nonetheless, have an SP for The Beatles. Indeed, we found 
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that respondents of all ages showed this phenomenon but older adults were more likely to 
recall memories slightly later in the SP compared to younger respondents – a small but 
reliable effect shown in Figure 2A.  
 
Our more general proposal is that most people in developing generation identity do so 
by identifying with and internalising aspects of culture, which for whatever reason they 
resonate with. It would, of course, be preposterous to suggest that this external identification 
rested solely on one’s experience of The Beatles and we certainly do not suggest that. 
However, identification and the subsequent formation of memories associated with aspects of 
culture must form a major part of the emergence of generation identity and identity in a more 
individual way too. It may be the case that pop music and pop culture have become one major 
source of cultural knowledge associated with the creation of autobiographical memories and 
autobiographical knowledge that underlie identity. But there are many other aspects of 
culture that could, and almost certainly do, serve this purpose too: politics, cultural 
movements, even sports (see Janssen, Rubin, & Conway, 2011), etc. There is no reason why 
several of these might not contribute equally to the creation of generation identity, thus, one 
could, for example, like the Beatles but still have (an equal number or even more) memories 
associated with the international politics of that time. Because generation identity depends on 
identification with different social groups its representation in memory is likely complex and 
diverse. Our central point here is that our findings demonstrate that aspects of generation 
identity, and identity more widely, can be detected and examined in sets of freely recalled 
autobiographical memories (given an appropriate cue). 
 
Qualities of Memories 
 
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Interestingly many respondents in the present study showed an SP for The Beatles 
with age of encoding occurring slightly later as respondent age increased. It is not clear why 
this should be but possibly the older respondents formed memories related to later work by 
the group, i.e., dating to the mid- rather than early-1960s. Although there were no reliable 
nationality differences, similar SPs were present in our collapsed group of the rest of the 
world compared to the U.K., where there was one notable difference: The song most often 
mentioned by respondents from the U.S. was “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1964, The 
Beatles’ first number one hit in North America which they played live on the Ed Sullivan 
show) whereas respondents from the U.K. most frequently mentioned “She Loves You” 
(1963, the song most credited with their initial fame – it flopped in the U.S.). The point being 
that different societies identified with different aspects of the Beatles.  
 
Age, Culture, and Cascading memories 
 
Other qualities of the memories showed that the majority of the memories were highly 
positive – more so than any other corpus of memories that we are aware of. They were also 
highly vivid and emotionally intense compared to many other studies of autobiographical 
memories that have collected such ratings. Rehearsal ratings were above moderate level (M = 
3.17 SD = 1.2) and these memories had not been extensively thought/talked about. We would 
have expected this to be higher, and to account for this one can perhaps argue that memories 
associated with the Beatles could be generational- defining, although there is overlap between 
generational and self defining. It could be that several of our respondents were from the 
Beatles era, but not consider the era as self-defining. However, our analysis also showed that 
all these ratings, judgments of memory qualities, vividness, AaE, emotional intensity, 
valence, and rehearsal, reliably correlated positively together (see appendix for details). This 
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is a frequent finding in autobiographical memory research and possibly reflects some overall 
property of memories that are grouped together. What that quality is we do not know. 
 
The findings also showed that music transmitted from generation-to-generation 
shaped respondents’ autobiographical memories, preferences, and emotional responses. This 
phenomenon of cascading SPs was first reported by Krumhansl and Zupnick (2013), who 
proposed that as these effects of cascading memories have not been found previously in other 
domains, that music may then be special, perhaps because of its strong personal and 
emotional meanings, its prevalence, and its role in social development. For these reasons, 
music-evoked autobiographical memories may have unique properties. Previous research has 
found that the music encountered during one’s late adolescence and early childhood has the 
greatest impact on individuals throughout their lives. Studies of older adults show, for 
example, that music from their youth is recognized more often, more facts are known about 
it, and that it evokes more specific autobiographical memories and stronger emotions than 
music from later in life (Schulkind, Hennis, & Rubin, 1999). 
 
Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman (1981) proposed childhood was a period where cultural 
transmission (knowledge, skills, abilities, social norms passed down in a social context, 
typically from one’s parents). For the younger respondents in our study, the recorded music 
their parents favoured during their childrearing years would have been played in the home, 
and this was supported in the memory content. 
 
Memory Perspective 
 
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Finally, consider the judgments of perspective in this corpus of memories. Memories 
were dominated by a field perspective, in other words respondents judged that in the majority 
of their memories they had a perspective that was close or similar to the original perspective 
they had at encoding. These field memories were reported as being more vivid and 
emotionally intense than observer memories. These findings are consistent with those of 
previous findings (see Akhtar, et. al., 2017, for review) and we consider them to be a type of 
manipulation check. Memories that preserve the rememberer’s original perspective, to at least 
some degree, are vivid and emotional, most probably are specific autobiographical memories, 
which is what respondents were asked to recall. Memories that have an observer perspective, 
in which one sees oneself, are memories that have clearly been recoded in some (currently 
unknown) way. Lower in vividness and emotion they may not be the highly specific 
autobiographical memories respondents were instructed to recall. What observer memories 
exactly are is unknown but whatever the explanation turns out to be they are not highly 
specific autobiographical memories. 
 
Summary 
 
Specific autobiographical memories recalled to the general memory cue “The 
Beatles” elicited a powerful SP effect across gender, nationalities, and age groups. We 
propose that this reflected identification with culture mainly occurring in early adolescence 
but also at older ages too. In our view it is strong evidence, from memory, of the formation of 
generation identity. Much as that was conceived of by the founder of the sociology of 
knowledge, Mannheim (1952), in the earlier part of the 20th century, in his famous essay: 
The problem of the generations. 
 
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Data availability statement 
The data that support the findings of this study will be available upon request. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
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Table 1. Descriptive statistics of questionnaire items 
Variables Mean (sd) 
Median (mad) Age at Encoding 
Mean (sd) 
Age 
Mean (sd) 
Count (%)  
Age at Encoding 13.6 (6.92) 13 (4.45)    
Like Beatles 3.21 (1.46) 2 (1.48)    
Vividness  4.36 (0.83) 5 (0)    
Emotional Intensity  4.08 (1.02) 4 (1.48)    
Valence 4.29 (1.07) 5 (0)    
Rehearsal 3.17 (1.12) 3 (1.48)    
Perspective Field     2757 (79%) 
Perspective Observer     750 (21%) 
 Era The Sixties   14.71 (7) 52.58 (12.01) 2115 (60%) 
 Era The Seventies   11.74 (6) 47.35 (9.5) 764 (22%) 
Era The Eighties   12.18 (6.6) 38.2 (8.3) 304 (9%) 
      Era The Nineties   12.57 (6.6) 28.0 (7.9) 322 (9%) 
      Era The Noughties   15.5 (6.3) 18.1 (2.09) 2 (0.5%) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Table 2. Age at encoding model summary   
 Age at Encoding 
Predictors Estimates 95% CI p 
(Intercept) 5.90 5.29 – 6.57 
 
Respondent age 1.01 1.01 – 1.01 <0.001 
Gender [Male] 0.99 0.96 – 1.02 0.662 
Nationality [British] 1.00 0.97 – 1.03 0.948 
Vividness 1.03 1.01 – 1.05 0.012 
Emotional intensity 1.04 1.02 – 1.06 <0.001 
Valence 0.97 0.95 – 0.98 <0.001 
Rehearsal 1.00 0.99 – 1.02 0.788 
Perspective [Field] 1.02 0.98 – 1.06 0.286 
Observations 3507 
R2 / R2 adjusted 0.123 / 0.121 
Note: coefficients are back-transformed to the original scale (years) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Table 3. Perspective taken model summary 
 Perspective [Field] 
Predictors Probabilities 95% CI p 
(Intercept) 0.29 0.19 – 0.41 
 
Respondent age 0.50 0.50 – 0.50 0.044 
Gender [Male] 0.51 0.47 – 0.55 0.731 
Vividness 0.58 0.56 – 0.61 <0.001 
Emotional intensity 0.50 0.48 – 0.53 0.721 
Valence 0.49 0.47 – 0.51 0.547 
Rehearsal 0.54 0.52 – 0.56 <0.001 
Observations 3347 
R2 Tjur 0.030 
 
Note: the model coefficients have been back-transformed and represent the probability of a 
respondent reporting a field perspective 
 
 
 
 
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Figure 1. Distribution of Age at Encoding 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Figure 2. Effects of reliable predictors in the AaE model. Results are back-transformed to the 
original scale (AaE in years). The grey band represents the 95% confidence interval. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Figure 3. Effects of reliable predictors in the perspective model. Results are back-transformed 
and represent probabilities of reporting a field perspective. The grey band represents the 95% 
confidence interval. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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