12 Lab 12. Flashbulb Memory: Do you Need a “Flash” to form a Flashbulb Memory?

Classroom Demonstration

Introduction

Remember during the first week of the semester when you were asked to remember an encounter with your roommate? Now, we want to see how much of that information you still remember, several months after that event took place. Before reading any further, answer the questions on the next several pages

Questionnaire

Answer the following questions, and after each rate your confidence in the accuracy of your statement, using the following scale:

1. What was the exact day and time of this meeting?

2. Describe in as much detail as possible where you were when this meeting took place.

3. Describe in as much detail as possible what both you and your roommate were doing when you ran into each other.

4. Which roommate did you see and who else was there when your meeting took place?

5. Describe in as much detail as possible what you and your roommates were wearing when your meeting took place.

6. What were your first thoughts when the meeting took place?

7. How long after your meeting took place did you write down your answers to the first questionnaire?

8. To the best of your ability, try to remember your single most vivid memory from the Saturday before classes started this semester.

How many times would you say you talked about this event to someone? (circle one)

How surprised were you by the recall test given several months after the event?

Last 6 Digits of your ID#

Historical Background

Can you remember what you were doing when you learned about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting? How about the Boston Marathon bombing, or when you learned that Michael Jackson had died? For most people, the answer is “yes.” They can tell you not only what happened (the event itself) but what they were doing, who told them the news, maybe even such minute details as who they were with, or what they were wearing. Such memories have been labeled “flashbulb memories” by Brown and Kulik (1977). Their findings demonstrated that those memories are remarkably vivid, unusually resistant to forgetting, and full of seemingly trivial detail. In short, their content is unlike that of most episodic memories. The term “flashbulb memory” even implies the existence of a photograph-like memory, complete with extreme detail.

Brown and Kulik (1977) maintained that not only is the content of such memories special, but so are the mechanisms involved in the formation of those memories. Specifically, they postulated a special kind of neural mechanism that “stamps in” the memories. The triggering of this mechanism hinges upon the recognition of surprise and novelty, and thus is closely tied to the emotion of the event. Because of the circumstances surrounding the event, the memories are preserved almost perfectly, as if a “snapshot” were taken of the event.

Though we still don’t know exactly how memory changes your neurons, we do know that memories, at least normal memories, are not “stamped in,” in the sense meant by Brown and Kulik (1977). Memories are also usually not perfect, or extremely detailed, or highly resistant to forgetting. Most memories are vague and fuzzy, and over time tend to lose a significant portion of their detail and sharpness. Because the memories surrounding events like the Challenger explosion do seem to have many of these qualities (like detail and resistance to forgetting) people naturally began studying flashbulb memories. The basic question researchers have been asking: is there something “special” about flashbulb memory? Is the mechanism that produces these memories different from mechanisms that produce normal memories?

This so-called “special mechanisms hypothesis” received some early support, but has been criticized by a number of investigators (e.g., McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen, 1988)who found that despite impressive retention of such information, the memories do not seem to be so remarkable that ordinary memory mechanisms can be ruled out. The memories are not perfect, and they are subject to forgetting. In short, to borrow a phrase, they are “special, but not so special.”

The debate about the existence of flashbulb memories rages on even today. In a very influential article, McCloskey, Wible and Cohen (1988) argue that the existence of a special memory mechanism is not warranted by the data. They designed their experiment around the tragic events surrounding the explosion of the Challenger in 1986. They asked people a series of questions a week after the event happened, such as whom they were with and what they were doing when the tragedy occurred. Many months later, they asked the same individuals the same set of questions, and compared the two results. Essentially, they found that the most impressive claims surrounding flashbulb memories did not hold true.

They proposed two criteria by which these memories can be judged. The first of these criteria constitute what McCloskey et al. (1988)call the “strong claims” view of flashbulb memory. These “strong claims” would include things like perfect accuracy, total resistance to forgetting, extreme detail, and would not require rehearsal to be encoded. From what we know about “regular” memories, if these strong claims were met, then there would obviously be a need for some special memory mechanism. We know that normal episodic memories do not have the properties described above.

In addition to the “strong claims,” McCloskey et al. (McCloskey et al., 1988) proposed a set of “weak claims” for flashbulb memories. Essentially, these are watered down versions of the “strong claims.” The weaker claims included high (but not perfect) resistance to forgetting, and that the memories be more detailed and accurate than usual–but not necessarily perfect.

While McCloskey et al. (McCloskey et al., 1988) found some support for the weak claims view of flashbulb memory, they found little support for the strong claims view. Given that the strong claims hypothesis was rejected, McCloskey et al. examined whether the weak claims hypothesis of flashbulb memory differed sufficiently from normal, emotional episodic memories as to warrant the existence of a special set of flashbulb memory mechanisms. They found that many of the things that produced vivid non-flashbulb memories also seemed to be important in the formation of flashbulb memories. As a result, they concluded that regular variables that are known to affect memory (like emotionality, uniqueness, and surprise) could also account for relatively vivid and accurate flashbulb memories.

Not all researchers agree. For example, Schmidt and Bohannon (1988) considered the conclusions reached by McCloskey et al. (1988) to be premature. They said that the strong claims view was unrealistically strict, and that McCloskey et al. had ignored the individual differences inherent in things like emotionality. Indeed, Schmidt and Bohannon (1988) conclude that the critical question is, “when subjects report high affect to an experience, is their memory for that experience different from memory for other experiences?” (p. 332). Additionally, Pillemer (1990) argues that we should not close the door on investigations of flashbulb memory just yet.

The real argument boils down to a few simple questions: Are flashbulb memories qualitatively different from normal episodic memories? Are regular memory mechanisms able to account for these findings? We know that the memories aren’t really “flashbulbs”–that is, they are not perfect, and so on. However, they do seem quite impressive in those respects. Still, do we remember the kinds of things during a “flashbulb” memory experience that we cannot normally remember?

One basic question that has not been answered by psychologists is, if individuals really wanted to, how much could they remember about a given event? Could a flashbulb memory be made from an ordinary event? If they could not, then it would seem likely that special mechanisms might be involved. If the event can be remembered several months after the event took place, then it is possible that ordinary memory mechanisms are able to encode this information with none of the special characteristics that flashbulb memories are said to possess. Note that the fact that they may be resistant to normal forgetting doesn’t imply that they have the same causes. It does suggest, though, that while the properties surrounding flashbulb memories are sufficient to cause a special memory, they may not be necessary for those memories to be formed.

During the first week of class you were asked to encode what must have seemed at the time a very trivial event. We asked you to remember in as much detail as possible an ordinary encounter with one of your roommates. What we did, in essence, was try to form an “artificial flashbulb memory.” We wanted to see if you could remember as much detail surrounding this ordinary event as people seem to in a typical “flashbulb memory” situation.

We are going to compare the two questionnaires from the two time periods, to see how similar they are. One of the major problems in studying flashbulb memories is that we have no way of knowing whether what you remember actually happened, or whether the “memory” you report is true. We were not there when the event happened, so we just don’t know. However, we do have the questionnaire that you filled out shortly after your meeting took place. We are going to assume that the event described in the first questionnaire is accurate.

We are going to score these memories using the same criteria used by Christiansen (1989), which is on reserve in the library. He scored the memories using a “lenient” criterion, where the overall gist of the memory was examined, but the details were allowed to vary. He also scored the accuracy of the memory using a “strict” criterion, where the details were scored as correct only if they matched exactly. For example, if you originally said that the meeting with your roommate took place at 3:40 in the afternoon, but on the follow-up questionnaire you said, “sometime between 3:30 and 4:00,” you would be scored as correct using the lenient criterion. However, since the details of the two memories did not match exactly, they would not be scored as correct using the strict criterion. If you said you were wearing a Texas Rangers baseball cap the first time, but upon subsequent recall you just said you were wearing a hat, that would be correct by the lenient criterion but not the strict criterion. If you had said, on the second questioning, you were wearing a Dallas Cowboys hat, it would be correct by neither criteria.

We informed half the class that they would later be asked the same set of questions. This would allow us to see if intentionality played an effect in the formation of these memories. Maybe you could form these memories if you thought you were going to be asked about them later, but under normal circumstances you wouldn’t.

One interesting footnote to this happened the first time I used it, in the Spring of 1991. One the second day of class, I told the students to form the artificial flashbulb memory of the meeting with their roommate. By sheer coincidence, the bombing of Iraq started that very day.28 Being the opportunistic sort, I quickly prepared a questionnaire to give to the students on the following Friday, to see how much they remembered of the real flashbulb event. They answered both questionnaires again at the end of the semester, three months after the original events. The comparisons are fascinating. I later wrote to these students (many had since graduated) to see how much they remembered about the two events one year later. Astonishingly, I heard back from all but one of the students. When making the comparisons, two things stood out. First, there were almost no differences in how much they remembered about the “real” flashbulb memory compared to the one we staged. Despite the fact that there were no differences in the memory for the two events, there were large differences in the confidence they reported for these memories. They were much more confident in their memory for the Gulf War events than in their personal encounter–but they were no more accurate. I wrote up these results, and the paper was published in the March, 1993 issue of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Questions for Lab 12

1. Do our data support the idea that we can form flashbulb-like memories in the absence of the usual flashbulb memory circumstances? Compare our results to those of Christiansen (Christianson, 1989). How do they differ? How are they similar?

2. There is a famous relationship between emotional arousal and performance that is known as the Yerkes-Dodson law. Basically, the Yerkes-Dodson law says that performance will vary in a U-shaped fashion with arousal. What does the Yerkes-Dodson law have to do with the existence of flashbulb memories, and the conditions under which they might be formed?

3. According to the papers you read, and those we discussed in class, which of the stages of memory (encoding, storage, and retrieval) would be most prominent in forming FB memories? What does your answer to Question #3 say about this issue? Intentionality would most likely affect which stage(s)?

4. It is claimed that the typical events surrounding flashbulb memories may be sufficient to cause these memories, but not necessary. What is meant by that statement? What are the kinds of events that typically surround flashbulb situations?

5. Which variables operate in a flashbulb memory situation that were not present in our memory test? What is the typical effect of those variables on memory?

6. Based upon the experiments here, and the readings you’ve done in class, what conclusions would you draw about the existence of a special mechanism that encodes flashbulb memory? Justify your answer.

7. One of the criticisms of Weaver (Weaver, 1993) was that the real flashbulb event–the initiation of the bombing–may have made the artificial flashbulb memory somehow more vivid. Compare your data with the “January, 1991” data of Weaver (Weaver, 1993). Did the subjects in that study seem to have higher initial levels of memory of confidence, for the artificial flashbulb memory, than you did? Explain.

8. What events have transpired in the past few years that might lead to the formation of long-lasting memories?

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