Popular music and movies as autobiographical memory cues

Research on music-evoked autobiographical memories has grown rapidly in recent years, suggesting that music can be an effective stimulus for cueing memories from one's life. One challenging aspect of this type of research is creating a stimulus set that is effective at cueing autobiographical memories in a wide range of individuals. The present work sought to address this issue by creating a normed stimulus set of popular music and popular movie cues. In addition to this methodological aim, we had an empirical aim to identify differences between autobiographical memories cued by music and movies. Participants (N = 248) either listened to excerpts of popular music or viewed clips of popular movies. After each stimulus, participants rated it on several dimensions, including emotional valence, emotional arousal, familiarity, and autobiographical salience. Results indicated that certain songs and movies are autobiographically salient across a wide age range of participants. Additionally, we identified that musical cues show a significantly more pronounced reminiscence bump than movie cues, suggesting that music from the reminiscence bump period of life is more effective at triggering memories. Overall, these data provide an important resource for researchers wishing to use popular media to cue autobiographical memories, as well as indicating differences between memories cued by music and movies.