This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

How many U.S. presidents can you name?

For most people, researchers have found...

The first couple are remembered like Washington, Adams,

and the last couple of Bush, people like that.

But then nothing in between.

New York University's Pasco Wallach studies what's called neural

data science dealing with the huge amounts of data that come with

studying neuronal activity. And he says our recall of presidents is

governed by two factors, what's known as the primacy effect, who came first, and the recency effect.

That's who's been around lately.

He and his colleagues wanted to see if the same type of cultural memory pattern would hold

true for pop music.

So the question was, is it like a cultural horizon or an event horizon at what point,

like a nod or something drops to zero?

So his team asked more than 600 volunteers, most of them millennials, to listen to snippets of Billboard number one hits from

1940 to 2015 and to say whether they'd heard the songs before. Turns out the

volunteers barely recognized tunes from the 40s and 50s.

I've melt your cold, cold heart.

Suggesting the primacy effect holds for presidents but not pop music.

But the recency effect did seem to hold true because songs released in the last few years were more recognized than those released in the

...