210 • CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors
Over the years since Brown and Kulik’s “Now Print”
proposal, research using the repeated recall task has shown
that fl ashbulb memories are not like photographs. Unlike
photographs, which remain the same for many years, people’s
memories for how they heard about fl ashbulb events change
over time. In fact, one of the main fi ndings of research on
fl ashbulb memories is that although people report that
memories surrounding fl ashbulb events are especially vivid,
they are often inaccurate or lacking in detail. For example,
Ulric Neisser and N. Harsch (1992) did a study in which they
asked participants how they had heard about the explosion
of the space shuttle Challenger (● Figure 8.7). The Challenger
broke apart 77 seconds after blasting off from Cape Canaveral
on January 28, 1986, killing the crew of seven, which included
Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school teacher,
who was the fi rst member of NASA’s Teacher in Space project.
Participants in Neisser and Harsh’s experiment fi lled out
a questionnaire within a day after the explosion, and then
fi lled out the same questionnaire 2 1/2 to 3 years later. One
participant’s response, a day after the explosion, indicated
that she had heard about it in class:I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]. I
didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had
all been watching, which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and
watched the TV program talking about it, and I got all the details from that.Two and a half years later, her memory had changed to the following:When I fi rst 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 fl ash, 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.Responses like these, in which participants fi rst reported hearing about the
explosion in one place, such as a classroom, and then later remembered that they
fi rst heard about it on TV, were common. Right after the explosion, 21 percent of the
participants indicated that they had fi rst heard about it on TV, but 2 1/2 years later,
45 percent of the participants reported that they had fi rst heard about it on TV. Reasons
for the increase in TV memories could be that the TV reports become more memorable
through repetition and that TV is a major source of news. Thus, memory for hearing
about the Challenger explosion had a property that is also a characteristic of memory
for less dramatic, everyday events: It was affected by people’s experiences following the
event (people may have seen accounts of the explosion) and their general knowledge
(before the Internet existed, people often fi rst heard about important news on TV).
The large number of inaccurate responses in the Challenger study suggests that
perhaps memories that are supposed to be fl ashbulb memories decay just like regular
memories. In fact, many fl ashbulb memory researchers have expressed doubt that
fl ashbulb memories are much different from regular memories (Schmolck et al., 2000).
This conclusion is supported by an experiment in which a group of college students was
asked a number of questions on September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (Talarico & Rubin, 2003). Some of these
questions were about the terrorist attacks (“When did you fi rst hear the news?”).
Others were similar questions about an everyday event in the person’s life that occurred
in the days just preceding the attacks. After picking the everyday event, the participant
created a two- or three-word description that could serve as a cue for that event in the
future. Some participants were retested 1 week later, some 6 weeks later, and some 32
weeks later by asking them the same questions about the attack and the everyday event.
One result of this experiment was that the participants remembered fewer details
and made more errors at longer intervals after the events, with little difference between●FIGURE 8.7 Neisser and Harsch (1992) studied people’s
memories for the day they heard about the explosion of the
space shuttle Challenger.Bettman/CORBISCopyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.