Fridge magnets can be cool aid to holiday memory recall, study finds

One participant said of their holiday habit: ‘Now I don’t tend to take a picture of anything … I’ll just get a fridge magnet at the end.’ Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

Whether holding up shopping lists or hastily scrawled messages, fridge magnets are highly functional holiday souvenirs. And a new study suggests these trinkets may also provide an important means of accessing happy – and not so happy – memories of past trips.

Pervasive as souvenirs are, surprisingly little research has investigated what happens to them after people’s holidays have ended, and even less has focused on fridge magnets, even though we interact with them almost every day.