What Is Flashbulb Memory?

A flashbulb memory is an exceptionally clear reflection of an important event (openstax 8.2). In most instances, people can recall the weather, what they were wearing, dialogue, etc.

Throughout our lives, we definitely have gone through a lot of experiences and made memories. Some of the memories are easily forgotten, while some others are remembered distinctively, vividly and can be recollected confidently. This is called the flashbulb memory. Flashbulb memory is like a very clear picture of a particularly impactful event which had caused one to be affected emotionally. For example, I remember this performance that my school choir was performing. It was during Christmas season and we decided to spray bubble foam to portray fake snow. However, the plan backfired when the wind blew at our direction and all the foam flew back to us. This was remembered very clearly because I was embarrassed and had experienced something so

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

Reading your post about 9/11 from such a young age was very interesting. My son was five at the time of the attacks and to this day he remembers the fact that he was upset because PBS interrupted their programming for the news coverage and he did not get to watch Clifford the Big Red Dog. My son may not remember the details of that day, but he will forever remember the disruption in his everyday routine caused by the attacks. Goldstein (2015) points out that the “idea that people believe flashbulb memories are stronger and more accurate has led to the conclusion that the special nature of flashbulb memories can be traced to the emotional nature of flashbulb events” (p. 216). For my son, he remembers his television programs being interrupted

I was in a dental continuing education class when the seminar was interrupted by an administrator with the news of planes crashing into the twin towers, this an example of a flashbulb memory. Flashbulb memories are the memories a person creates when they hear shocking news, where the memory is more accurate of what a person was doing or where they were, more so than the actual event details. Flashbulb memories are based more on an emotional level of the person, where as ordinary memories are created based on an actual event or occasion happening, so that your emotion plays a larger part on the details and vivid memories of the dramatic event that created your flashbulb memory. Studies have shown that ordinary memories will dim over time and

The independent variable in this case was the type of questions asked. After a week, more questions were asked about the clip they had previously seen and if they had witnessed any broken glass within the clip. The participants who saw the verb ‘smashed’ were more likely to claim that they saw broken glass than the other groups. Loftus and Palmer concluded that memory can be easily manipulated and distorted by the type of questions asked and that the information can merge with a memory already stored causing inaccuracy. “The results from experiment two suggest that this effect is not just due to a response-bias because leading questions actually altered the memory a participant had for the event.” (McLeod, S, 2014).

Flashbulb memories are ones that, unlike others, are automatically encoded and are in a permanent sort of storage in our minds. Flash bulb memories are often accompanied by strong emotions that flood an individual, as well as being extremely vivid and charged.(Ciccarelli & White, 2015, p.240) One of the most well known examples of flashbulb memory are experienced by those of the baby-boomer generation. These individuals often claim that they remember exactly where they were, what they were doing and the details of their surroundings on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Although these memories might seem to be exact, time can alter these memories without the individual noticing. This is why some psychologists are not fond of or

This process in the brain is known as pragmatic inferences. An example of how these inferences have an effect on our memory was presented by an experiment where the participants had to read sentences such as “Jerry was working on fixing his wardrobe, when his wife heard him pound nails into the wood, then she came in and offered to help.” Similar to this, when a variation of sentences was presented and asked to identify what the participants had just read, 57% of participants said that “Jerry was trying to fix the wardrobe with a hammer…”, even though, a hammer was never mentioned in the sentence. Our brain associates the action, pounding nails, with the tool, hammer, causing the brain to generate a false memory of what they just read. The cognitive task on False Memory implements the theory of how schemas and pragmatic inferences has an effect on the accuracy of the details in our memory. One crucial fact about false memory is that it arises from the same constructive process that produces true

A study that contradicts their theory was conducted by Neisser & Harsch in 1992. They wanted to explore the accuracy of flashbulb memory and so they gave out a questionnaire to 106 participants the day after the ‘Challenger Space Shuttle’ Explosion. Three years later, they sent out the exact same questionnaire to the same group of participants and compared the answers to the original. The results displayed that the participant’s’ memories faded from the time they took the questionnaire to the time they took it three years later. Even though such errors were evident, the participants remained very confident about the accuracy of their memory. Neisser and Harsch concluded that flashbulb memories are not as vivid and accurate as previously thought.

While these studies do not fully exemplify the harmful reality of false memories, they take a step towards understanding how these false memories might occur in real-world settings. As Loftus (1997) discusses, it is only natural to wonder whether or not this research is applicable to real-world situations such as being interrogated by law officers or in psychotherapy. What researchers have learned, and can apply to this practical problem is that there are social demands on individuals to remember and come up with detailed memories. Not only that, but memory construction through suggestion and imagining events has been shown to be explicitly encouraged when people are having trouble remembering events (Loftus, 1997).

Before reviewing the accuracy of flashbulb memory, it is important to consider that not all research supports Brown and Kulik’s description of flashbulb memories as highly accurate (1977). For instance, Talarico and Rubin compared the consistency of September 11 terrorist attacks’ flashbulb memories with everyday memories and found no difference - with equal amounts decay in both cases (2003). However,

A study conducted by Sharot.et.al (2006) on the 9/11 terrorist attacks linked that proximity played a fundamental part on how accurate the recollection a flashbulb memory is. the study took place three years after the event and participants where asked to recall memories from that day on 9/11. They recalled that some were in down town Manhattan close to the world trade centre while others where a few miles away.

Memory facilitates necessary functions in daily life activities, but it is not a perfect mechanism in operation. Goldstein (2011) states that memory is, “…the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present” (p.116). There are many adaptive functions within the complexities of the human memory system and the interlinked constructs between each function leave room for doubt in the accuracy of recollection. Study of the human mind has opened avenues of discovery on the inner workings of our brains and the resulting knowledge suggests that humans are prone to creating false memories and even remembering things that never actually happened. A great deal of information has been written explaining the nature of memory errors and within the following pages a real-life case offers a glimpse into how recall distortions and memory errors can wield unpleasant consequences. Memory errors can be avoided with a significant effort, but the truth remains that no one is perfect and memories are subject to individual bias.

Like the experiment done by Conway et al, Neisser and Harsch investigated people’s memory accuracy of the incident 24 hours after the explosion and then again two years after. The results were: one day after the disaster, 215 of the participants said that they heard about the disaster on television. Two and a half years later 45% of the participants claimed to have heard of the event on the television. Their memories of how they learned the news about the challenger disaster changed over time and was a huge loophole in the studies in favor of flashbulb memory. Through this study it can be concluded that flashbulb memories are not reliable and may in fact just be ordinary memories.

There is also evidence against Flashbulb memories such as firstly it cannot be proved whether the participants are telling the truth or lying about an event since everyone's interpretation of where they were etc will be different, so it cannot be proved whether it is a flashbulb memory or just a memory. Secondly it is also difficult to prove how accurate flashbulb memories are since they all have different degrees of significance to people too so certain people will remember less or more and others will forget parts of the memory where as others will not. Thirdly with large events such as