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Public Events Knowledge in an Age-Heterogenous Sample
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Description: The reminiscence bump describes an increased recollection of autobiographic experiences made in adolescence and early adulthood. It is unclear if this phenomenon can also be found for declarative knowledge of past public events. To answer this question, we assessed public events knowledge (PEK) about the past six decades with a 120-item knowledge test across six domains in a sample of 1,012 Germans that were sampled uniformly across the ages 30 to 80 years. General and domain-specific PEK scores were analyzed as a function of age-at-event. Scores were lower for public events preceding participants’ birth and stayed stable from the age-at-event of five to ten years onwards. There was no significant peak in PEK in adolescence or early adulthood, arguing against an extension of the reminiscence effect to factual knowledge. We examined associations between PEK and relevant variables such as crystallized intelligence (Gc), news consumption, and openness to experience with structural equation models. Strong associations between PEK and Gc were established, whereas the associations of PEK with news consumption and openness were mainly driven by their link to declarative knowledge.