Memory for “Exceptional” Events • 209fi rst heard about the attacks? How you found out? Where you were? Your initial
reaction? What you did next? I remember walking into the psychology department
offi ce and hearing from a secretary that someone had crashed a plane into the World
Trade Center. At the time, I pictured a small private plane that had gone off course,
but a short while later, when I called my wife, she told me that the fi rst tower of the
World Trade Center had just collapsed. Shortly after that, in my cognitive psychology
class, my students and I discussed what we knew about the situation and decided to
cancel class for the day.
The memories I have described about how I heard about the 9/11 attack, and
the people and events directly associated with fi nding out about the attack, are still
vivid in my mind more than 8 years later. Is there something special about memories
that are associated with unexpected, emotionally charged events? According to Roger
Brown and James Kulik (1977), there is. They proposed that memories for the circum-
stances surrounding learning about events such as 9/11 are special. Their proposal
was based on an earlier event—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on
November 22, 1963.
In referring to the day Kennedy’s assassination occurred, Brown and Kulik stated
that “for an instant, the entire nation and perhaps much of the world stopped still
to have its picture taken.” This description, which likened the process of forming a
memory to the taking of a photograph, led them to coin the term fl ashbulb memory to
refer to a person’s memory for the circumstances surrounding hearing about shocking,
highly charged events. It is important to emphasize that the term fl ashbulb memory
refers to memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an
event, not memory for the event itself. Thus, a fl ashbulb memory for 9/11 would be
memory for where you were and what you were doing when you found out about the
terrorist attack.
Brown and Kulik argue that there is something special about the mechanisms
responsible for fl ashbulb memories. Not only do they occur under highly emotional
circumstances, but they are remembered for long periods of time and are especially
vivid and detailed. Brown and Kulik describe the mechanism responsible for these vivid
and detailed memories as a “Now Print” mechanism, as if these memories are like a
photograph that resists fading.
Brown and Kulik’s idea that flashbulb memories are like a photograph was
based on people’s descriptions of what they remembered about how they had
heard about events like the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther
King, Jr. From these descriptions, Brown and Kulik concluded that people could
often describe in some detail what they were doing when they heard about these
highly emotional events. But the procedure Brown and Kulik used was flawed
because the only data they collected were what people remembered years after the
events had occurred. The problem with this procedure is that there was no way to
determine whether the reported memories were accurate. The only way to check
for accuracy is to compare the person’s memory to what actually happened or to
memory reports collected immediately after the event. The technique of compar-
ing later memories to memories collected immediately after the event is called
repeated recall.METHOD Repeated Recall
The idea behind repeated recall is to determine whether memory changes over time, by testing
participants a number of times after an event. The person’s memory is fi rst measured immediately
after a stimulus is presented or something happens. Even though there is some possibility for
errors or omissions immediately after the event, this report is taken as being the most accurate
representation of what happened and is used as a baseline. Days, months, or years later, when
participants are asked to remember what happened, their reports are compared to this baseline.
This use of a baseline provides a way to check the accuracy of later reports.Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.