Table 2. Method of memory activation/life scripts and bump range.

Serial no.	First Author/Year	Method of memory activation/Instruction for life scripts*	Range of bump
Important memories method
1	Berntsen, 2011 [107]	Participants recalled the most positive event of their lives and the traumatic or negative event that currently troubles them the most	Most positive event of lives: 20–29
2	Dickson, 2011 [68]	In Study 2, participants recalled an especially positive event and an especially negative event, or a surprising positive event and a surprising negative event In Study 4, participants recalled a highly expected event and a highly unexpected event. Participants also rated the emotional valence of both the highly expected and highly unexpected event they mentioned Though the authors subsequently report the individual distributions for both the positive and negative expected and unexpected events, they also report the overall distributions, collapsed across positive and negative events; we report the bump in these overall distributions.	Especially Positive Event: 16–30 Surprising Positive Event: 16–30 Highly Expected Event: 16–30 Highly Unexpected Event: 16–30
3	Ece, 2014 [69]	Life script task: ten most important events in an expected life course of a person in their culture Autobiographical memory task: report 10 important personally experienced life events	Expected life events: 16–20, 21–25, and 26–30 years Autobiographical memories: no reminiscence bump but clear childhood amnesia and recency effects
4	Fromholt, 2003 [73]	Centenarians provided autobiographical memories to either a request for a life narrative or a request to produce AM to 15 word cues. Experiment 1: 15-minute free narrative of life history following the instruction: “Tell about the events that have been important in your life” Experiment 2: provide a specific, datable auto-biographical memory for 15 word cues (English translation: cat, cotton, fire, flag, flower, friend, money, morning, nail, picture, road, storm, sugar, ticket, and window).	15–30
5	Rubin, 2003 [33]	Study 1: Memories for most afraid, most proud, most jealous, most in love, most angry, and most important event and whether this event was positive or negative Study 2: Estimate 70-year-old men or women person’s age during each of a series of emotionally charged events	Study 1: • Most positive important event: peaks in 20s • Most angry: 13–19 • Most afraid: 20–29 Study 2: • Most in love, Most important: 20–29 • Happiest, Proudest: 30–39
6	Svob, 2012 [100]	Participants recalled and dated 10 important events from one of their parents’ lives	Reminiscence bump related to parents’ age at the time of the recalled events = 20–30 Mini-bump from the time the participant was born up to the present = 40–50
7	Berntsen, 2002 [31]	Participants were asked age of happiest, saddest, most traumatic, most important memory, and most recent involuntary memory	Most important event: 20–29 Happiest event: 20–29
8	Leist, 2010 [91]	Life Events lists: Participants marked each negative and positive life event on the lists, if the event occurred Functions of autobiographical memory, Time and Future Perspective Questionnaire	20–29
9	Rathbone, 2008 [93]	All memories participants generated in association to “I am” statements: • Study 1: 10 memories to each of three statements • Study 2: 8 memories to each of four statements, as well as just the first three memories	All Memories: No Bump First Three Memories: 20–40
10	Fromholt, 1991 [72]	15-minute free narrative of life history focusing on important events 10-item meta-memory questionnaire	10–30
11	Elnick, 1999 [70]	A life history timeline and a description of three significant life events narrative The Family APGAR Bloom's Colorado Self-Report Measure of Family Functioning Defense Styles Questionnaire Modification of the Close Relationship Questionnaire Self-Representations	Life history timeline: 20–29 Three significant life events narrative: 20–29
12	Fitzgerald, 1996 [35]	Participants recalled four events that they would include in a book about their life	16–25
13	Glück, 2007 [22]	Participants completed the Life Story Questionnaire, in which individuals list up to 15 events or experiences that they consider most personally important in their life	16–30
14	Alea, 2014 [59]	10 word cues: paper, pencil, child, hostage, seat, hospital, corpse, anxiety, candy, hammer Life events questionnaire for 14 life events	Positive Memories: 6–15; 26–30 Negative Memories: 6–15; 26–30
Word and other cuing methods
15	Bohn, 2011 [60]	Study 1: children wrote future life stories Study 2: word cues to write down events from their future lives	Study 1: • Life scripted events: 20–30 • Non-life scripted events: 20–30 Study 2: Life scripted events: 20–30
16	Chu, 2000 [61]	27 odor-related words	11–25
17	Conway, 1999 [62]	Young and older groups of Bangladeshi participants recalled and dated autobiographical memories from across the lifespan in response to 15 word cues	10–30 Older adults 2nd bump: 35–55
18	Copeland, 2009 [64]	Forgetting curves for information read in a 10-chapter novel where each chapter covered an approximately 10-year period in the life of the protagonist	Novel summaries: 20s, 50s Cued protagonist task: • Chapter 3: 22 years • Chapter 6: 50s
19	Koppel, 2016a [88]	Word cuing method (10 word cues; i.e. money, water, child, clothing, church, woman, street, fire, kiss and city) Important memories/important events method for three most important memories	Cue word method: 5–19 Important memories method: 20–29
20	Koppel, 2016b [89]	Study 1: Seven word-cued and important autobiographical memories Study 2: Seven word-cued and important autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old	Study 1: • Actual cue word method: 6–10 • Actual important memories method: 16–30 Study 2: • Imagined cue word method: 6–25 • Imagined important memories method: 16–30
21	Maki, 2013 [114]	22 word cues (emotional, emotion-provoking, and neutral)	Neutral cue words: 9–12 Emotion-provoking words: 17–21 Emotional cue words: No peak (8–30)
22	Rybash, 1999 [95]	18 Total words, with an unspecified combination of nouns, activity verbs, and affect terms Authors collected remember/know ratings for each memory, and plotted the distributions separately for memories that received either remember, or know judgements	6–15
23	Schrauf, 1998 [96]	Autobiographical memories to 50 word cues	10–30, 20–24, 34–35
24	Schuman, 2014 [17]	A specific event from own life in response to eight word cues (e.g. flower, horse, fire, bird, lake, window, book, and friend) Collective memories for national and world events rated important	Autobiographical memories: 5–20 Collective memories: 5–30
25	Fitzgerald, 1988 [24]	Study 1: 40 word cues autobiographical memory task Study 2: three flashbulb vivid memory descriptions	16–20
26	Haque, 2010 [75]	Participants recalled the happiest event, saddest event, most important event, most traumatic event, most angry event, most in love event, most jealous event, most proud event, most fearful event, the event indicating the highest success, and the most surprising event of their lives	Happiest Event: 20–29 Most Important Event: 20–29 Most in Love Event: 20–29
27	Jansari, 1996 [76]	Experiment 1: participants recalled events freely or under instructions to avoid recent memories. (16 Nouns, 16 Activity Verbs, and 16 Affect Words) Experiment 2: recall was constrained to particular life periods. (Participants recalled memory to sixteen word cues (6 nouns, 5 verbs, and 5 affect words) from)	6–15
28	Janssen, 2003 [77]	64 word cues	10–30
29	Janssen, 2005 [78]	10 word cues: recall and date autobiographical memories	15–25 Peaks: Men, 15–18; Women, 13–14
30	Janssen, 2008 [30]	10 word cues: describe the personal events that came to mind	6–19 (Overall) Young adults: 8–12 Middle-aged adults: 6–16 Older adults: 7–20
31	Janssen, 2011 [81]	Galton–Crovitz test: 64 word cues	4–21
32	Janssen, 2011 [82]	10 noun word cues	6–20
33	Kawasaki, 2011 [86]	Each participant received a random selection of 10 word cues out of 64 word cues	Young adults: 5–13 Middle-aged adults: 6–15
34	Rubin, 1997 [15]	124 word cues 5 most important memories	10–29
35	Rubin, 1997 [16]	124 word cues for autobiographical memories	10–30
36	Wolf, 2016 [105]	39 word cues: nouns, verbs, and adjectives	10–20
37	Maki, 2006 [106]	9 nouns, 7 emotional words, and 6 emotion-provoking words	7–25
38	Schlagman, 2009 [109]	Diary Word cues (e.g. cabin, pipe, elephant, chest, silk, theatre, watch, whip, pillow, and giant)	10–30
39	Gidron, 2007 [74]	Modified Autobiographical Memory Assessment: autobiographical memories to 4 groups of 16 word cues reflecting events from childhood, adolescence, adulthood and late age	10–25
40	Raffard, 2010 [108]	Self-defining memories questionnaire: Participants recalled three self-defining memories	Control: 20–24 Schizophrenia: 15–19
41	Raffard, 2009 [111]	Self-defining memories questionnaire: Participants recalled three self-defining memories	Schizophrenia: 15–19 Control: 20–24
42	Webster, 2007 [104]	Described a vivid memory that “was important in your life, or that changed how you think about yourself”	20–29
Life Scripts
43	Berntsen, 2004 [32]	Reanalysis of earlier studies on age norms How old hypothetical centenarians were when they were most happy, most sad, most afraid, most in love, and had their most important and most traumatic experiences Seven important events likely to occur in the life of a newborn	Positive events: 15–30
44	Erdoğan, 2008 [71]	List the seven most important events a newborn or an elderly person would experience during his/her lifetime and estimate the prevalence, importance, age-at-event and emotional valence of each	Study 1: • Positive events: 20–30 • Negative events: 10–20 Study 2: Positive events: 20–30
45	Janssen, 2015 [84]	Life script questionnaire (i.e., personal events; seven most important events expected to happen in a prototypical infant's life) Modified version of the life script questionnaire (i.e., public events)	16–30
46	Koppel, 2014 [87]	Study 1: probing cultural expectations for the expected timing of the public event that a typical person considers to be the most important of their lifetime Study 2: probing cultural expectations for the expected timing of the objectively most important public event of a typical person’s lifetime	Study 1: 11–30 Study 2: 11–30 Peak: 16–20, 21–25
47	Tekcan, 2012 [101]	Adolescents, young adults, and older adults listed the seven most important events that a typical newborn would experience in a lifetime	Positive events: 30–39 Negative events for adolescents, young adults: 13–19
Other methods
48	Cappeliez, 2008 [9]	Write in home dream diary for a week	15–25
49	Conway, 2005 [63]	Participants were required to recall 20 specific AMs from their own lives	10–30
50	Davison, 2008 [65]	A questionnaire in which 40-year-olds and senior adults described and dated up to five regrets for specific or general experiences	Study 1: 10–19 Study 2, Participants in Their 40s: 20–29 Study 2, Participants in Their 60s: 20–29
51	Demiray, 2009 [66]	Participants free-recalled autobiographical memories, and were given 7 min to retrieve as many memories as they could for each five-year interval in their life (e.g. from 20–25)	10–30
52	Denver, 2010 [67]	Free recall flashbulb memories from personal lives, 9/11, and a personal flashbulb memory. Adapted version of the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire	Study 1: 10–30 Study 2: 10–30
53	Holmes, 1999 [10]	Participants free-recalled when they had learned public and private items of news	Public Items: 10–19 Private items of news: 20–29
54	Rubin, 1998 [11]	Factual, semantic, general-knowledge, multiple-choice questions about the Academy Awards, the World Series, and current events	10–30
55	Schroots, 2004 [110]	Life-line Interview Method: Participants were asked to draw a life-line for both past and future events, and to date and label each event	10–40
56	Cuervo-lombard, 2007 [112]	Participants recalled 20 specific autobiographical events during their lifetime	Patients: 16–25 Controls: 21–25
57	Schrauf, 2001 [97]	Hispanic adults who immigrated to the USA at ages 20–22, 24–28, and 34–35 narrated their life‐stories on twice, once in English and once in Spanish	Early immigrators (ages 20, 21, 22) = 20–29 Middle immigrators (ages 24, 26, 28, 30) = 30–39 Late immigrators (ages 34, 35, 35) = 40–49
58	Steiner, 2014 [99]	Novel interview: older adults provided oral life stories, and they divided their transcribed narratives into chapters	17–24
59	Thomsen, 2008 [102]	Participants recalled the five events that they considered most central to their life story	6–30
60	Thomsen, 2011 [103]	After dividing their life story into chapters, participants recalled an important specific memory from their most positive and most negative chapter, respectively	Memory from the most positive chapter: 21–30
61	Krumhansl, 2013 [90]	Young adults’ personal memories associated with top music hits over 5-and-a-half decades	Unclear
62	Platz, 2015 [92]	Experiment 1: Participants listened to excerpts from 80 number-one, popular music hits from 1930 to 2010 and gave written self-reports on music-evoked autobiographical memories Experiment 2: Other participants rated affective characteristics	15–24
63	Rathbone, 2017 [94]	Memories related to top-grossing films and songs, selecting the five that were most personally significant	Study 1: Personally significant films and songs, Songs: 15–19 Study 2: Songs, 10–14 Films: No Bump
64	Schubert, 2016 [98]	Participants were asked to recall a single memorable musical event from “a time long ago”	13–14
65	Janssen, 2007 [79]	Participants were asked to name their three favorite books, movies, and records and time period they first encountered them	16–20
66	Janssen, 2008 [80]	Yearly News Memory Test (YNMT)	10–25
67	Janssen, 2012 [83]	Participants were asked who they thought the five best players of all time were	11–30
68	Ju, 2016 [85]	Reactions to nostalgic advertising	15–24

* For the ease of categorization, we have classified studies using more than one method of memory activation/instruction for life scripts under one method based upon the dominant method employed. The “Range of bump” column, however, illustrates ranges for all the methods utilized within each study despite the study’s location under the heading for the dominant method employed.

The range and location of the bump vary with respect to the method for activating different types of memories.