TY - JOUR
T1 - The universal decay of collective memory and attention
AU - Candia, Cristian
AU - Jara-Figueroa, C.
AU - Rodriguez-Sickert, Carlos
AU - Barabási, Albert László
AU - Hidalgo, César A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2019/1/1
Y1 - 2019/1/1
N2 - Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural memory). Here, we use data on the citation of academic articles and patents, and on the online attention received by songs, movies and biographies, to describe the temporal decay of the attention received by cultural products. We show that, once we isolate the temporal dimension of the decay, the attention received by cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function. We explain this universality by proposing a mathematical model based on communicative and cultural memory, which fits the data better than previously proposed log-normal and exponential models. Our results reveal that biographies remain in our communicative memory the longest (20–30 years) and music the shortest (about 5.6 years). These findings show that the average attention received by cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function.
AB - Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural memory). Here, we use data on the citation of academic articles and patents, and on the online attention received by songs, movies and biographies, to describe the temporal decay of the attention received by cultural products. We show that, once we isolate the temporal dimension of the decay, the attention received by cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function. We explain this universality by proposing a mathematical model based on communicative and cultural memory, which fits the data better than previously proposed log-normal and exponential models. Our results reveal that biographies remain in our communicative memory the longest (20–30 years) and music the shortest (about 5.6 years). These findings show that the average attention received by cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058158285&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41562-018-0474-5
DO - 10.1038/s41562-018-0474-5
M3 - Article
C2 - 30932052
AN - SCOPUS:85058158285
SN - 2397-3374
VL - 3
SP - 82
EP - 91
JO - Nature Human Behaviour
JF - Nature Human Behaviour
IS - 1
ER -