The universal decay of collective memory and attention

Cristian Candia*, C. Jara-Figueroa, Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert, Albert László Barabási, César A. Hidalgo

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)82-91
Number of pages10
JournalNature Human Behaviour
Volume3
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2019
Externally publishedYes

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