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Flashbulb Memory Research Paper

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September 11, 2001is the day when Islamic terrorists crashed four planes in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Most people can easily remember when this happened, but are they really remembering the attacks themselves or are they just remembering hearing about the attacks? People cannot fully remember an experience they didn't actually witness, so what are they remembering? The events of September 11 was the great opportunity to study the phenomenon of flashbulb memories for many psychologist.

FLASHBULB MEMORIES A flashbulb memory is “a detailed and vivid memory that is stored on one occasion and retained for a lifetime. Usually, such memories are associated with important historical or autobiographical events.” (memorylossonline.com) In the article, Brown and Kulik defined the flashbulb memory as a “vividly detailed memory of the circumstances under which one first learned of a surprising, consequential, emotionally involving event”. Flashbulb memories is the situation when our mind “taking a picture” of what is happening around us. Those memories etched in our brains, …show more content…

All survey participants still had a lot of memories of the event: who they were with, how they felt, and etc. Here we can say that all of the survey participants had a flashbulb memory. All of them usually highly confident in their memories. Despite this confidence, after conducting the research, the scientist saw significant inconsistencies. The research showed that even after 10 years of the tragedy, people were still about 60% accurate. We can conclude, that flashbulb memories more accurate then memories for most events that took place 10 years before. However, there is another interesting thing about flashbulb memories. If someone added an incorrect detail of what happened into the person memory, that misinformation will likely to stay in persons head, and become the part of the

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