The peaks of life: The differential temporal locations of the reminiscence bump across disparate cueing methods

• We establish that, across the literature, the reminiscence bump is earlier for word-cued memories than important memories.
• We evaluate the consistency of each theoretical account of the bump with the temporal location of each individual bump.
• We also evaluate the consistency of each account with these differential locations of the bump across cueing methods.
• We conclude that only the life script account meets both of these criteria in the case of important memories.
• We conclude that none of the existing accounts meet both criteria in the case of word-cued memories.

The reminiscence bump has generally been assessed through either (1) the cue word method, or (2) several related methods which we refer to under the umbrella of the important memories method. Here we provide a review of the literature demonstrating that the temporal location of the bump varies systematically according to cueing method, with the mean range of the bump located from 8.7 to 22.5 years of age for word-cued memories, versus 15.1 to 27.9 for important memories. This finding has hitherto been under-acknowledged, as existing theoretical accounts of the bump generally hold its location to be stable across cueing methods. We therefore re-evaluate existing theoretical accounts of the bump in light of these varying locations, addressing each account's consistency with (1) the respective bumps found through each method taken individually, and (2) the sensitivity of the bump's location to cueing method.