Flashbulb Memories

Flashbulb Memories
Although it does not appear that intention to learn affects memory, a different question is whether people display better memory for events that are impor- tant to them. One class of research involves flashbulb memories—events so
important that they seem to burn themselves into memory forever (Brown & Kulik, 1977). The event these researchers used as an example was the assassi- nation of President Kennedy in 1963, which was a particularly traumatic event for Americans of their generation. They found that most people still had vivid memories of the event 13 years later. They proposed that we have a special bi- ological mechanism to guarantee that we will remember those things that are particularly important to us. The interpretation of this result is problematic, however, because Brown and Kulik did not really have any way to assess the ac- curacy of the reported memories.
Since the Brown and Kulik proposal, a number of studies have been done to determine what participants remembered about a traumatic event im- mediately after it occurred and what they remembered later. For instance, McCloskey, Wible, and Cohen (1988) did a study involving the 1986 space shut- tle Challenger explosion. At that time, many people felt that this was a particu- larly traumatic event they had watched with horror on television. McCloskey et al. interviewed participants 1 week after the incident and then again 9 months later. Nine months after the accident, one participant reported:
When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked. I was really upset and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine and then I called my parents. (Neisser & Harsch, 1992, p. 9)
McCloskey et al. found that although participants reported vivid memories 9 months after the event, their reports were actually often inaccurate. For in- stance, the participant just quoted had actually learned about the Challenger ex- plosion in class a day after it happened and then watched it on television.
Palmer, Schreiber, and Fox (1991) came to a somewhat different con- clusion in a study of memories of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. They compared participants who had actually experienced the earthquake first- hand with those who had only watched it on TV. Those who had experienced it in person showed much superior long-term memory of the event. Con- way et al. (1994) argued that McCloskey et al. (1988) failed to find a memory advantage in the Challenger study because their participants did not have true flashbulb memories. They contended that flashbulb memories are pro- duced only if the event was consequential to the individual remembering it. Hence, only people who actually experienced the San Francisco earthquake, and not those who saw it on TV, had flashbulb memories of the event. Conway et al. studied memory for Margaret Thatcher’s resignation as prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1990. They compared participants from the United King- dom, the United States, and Denmark, all of whom had followed news reports of the resignation. It turned out that 11 months later, 60% of the participants from the United Kingdom showed perfect memory for the events surrounding the resignation, whereas only 20% of those who did not live in the United Kingdom showed perfect memory. Conway et al. argued that this was because the Thatcher resignation was really consequential only for the U.K. participants.
On September 11, 2001, Americans suffered a particularly traumatic event, the terrorist attacks that have come to be known simply as “9/11.” A number of studies were undertaken to study the effects of these events on memory. Talarico and Rubin (2003) report a study of the memories of students at Duke University for details of the terrorist attacks (flashbulb memories) versus details of ordi- nary events that happened that day. The students were contacted and tested for their memories the morning after the attacks. They were then tested again either 1 week later, 6 weeks later, or 42 weeks later. The recall of details that are consistent with what they said the morning after and recall of details that were inconsistent (presumably false memories). By neither measure is there any evidence that the flashbulb mem- ories were better retained than the everyday memories.
12 Sharot, Martorella, Delgado, and Phelps (2007) reported a study of people who were in Manhattan, where the Twin Towers were struck on 9/11. The study was performed 3 years after the attack, and people were asked to recall the events from the attack and events from the summer before. Because the study was 3 years after the event, and they could not verify participants’ memories for accuracy but they could study their brain responses while they were recalling the events, Sharot et al. also interviewed the participants to find out where they were in Manhattan when the Twin Towers were struck. They broke the participants into two groups— a downtown group who were approximately 2 miles away and a midtown group who were approximately 5 miles away. They focused on activity in the amygdala, which is a brain structure known to reflect emotional response. They found greater amygdala activation in the downtown group when they were recalling events from 9/11 than in the midtown group. This is significant because there is evidence that amygdala activity enhances retention (Phelps, 2004). In a state of arousal, the amygdala releases hormones that influence the processing in the hippocampus that is critical in forming memories (McGaugh & Roozendaal, 2002).

Flashbulb Everyday
Hirst and 17 other authors (2009) report a very extensive study of mem- ory of 9/11 events, involving over 3,000 individuals from seven American cities. They conducted three surveys: 1 week after the attack, 11 months later, and 35 months later. Like Talarico and Rubin (2003), they found significant forgetting, not inconsistent with the amount of forgetting one might see for ordinary memories. However, in a detailed analysis of their results, they found evidence for some nuanced elaborations on this conclusion. First, par- ticipants’ memories for their strong emotional reactions elicited by the 9/11 events were quite poor compared to memories for the 9/11 events themselves. Second, when one examines the memories for the 9/11 events , one sees an interesting pattern. Some facts, such as the names of the air- lines, show a rather continuous decline, but there is little forgetting for other facts, such as the crash sites. The most interesting pattern concerns mem- ory for where President Bush was when the attack occurred, which shows a drop from Survey 1 to Survey 2 but a rise from Survey 2 to Survey 3.  A significant factor is whether the participants had seen Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 911, which had been released during the interval between Survey 2 and Survey 3. The film features the fact that Bush was reading a storybook called “The Pet Goat” to children in a Florida ele- mentary school at the time. Those participants who saw the movie showed a strong boost on the third survey in their ability to remember the location of President Bush. More generally, Hirst et al. tracked the reporting of 9/11 events in the media and found that this factor had a strong influence on peo- ple’s memory for the events. They also found a relationship between how much people remembered and how often they talked about specific events. This suggests that to the extent there is improved memory for flashbulb events, it may be produced by rehearsal of the events in the media and in conversations. The reason why people close to a traumatic event sometimes show better memory (such as in the Conway study about Thatcher’s resigna- tion) may be because it continues to be replayed in the media and rehearsed in conversation.
■ People report better memories for particularly traumatic events, but these memories seem no different than other memories.