Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

flashbulb memory: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct Nearest construct by meaningiconicitycompare the meanings
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flashbulbmemory1 CONSTRUCTFlashbulb memoryBROWN & KULIK · FLASHBULB

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Cognitive psychology

The vivid, lasting memory of the moment one learned shocking news

Roger Brown and James Kulik introduced the term in their 1977 paper Flashbulb memories (Cognition), naming the unusually vivid and durable memory people form of the moment they learned of a shocking, consequential piece of news, together with the circumstances around it: where they were, who told them, what they were doing, and how they felt. They proposed that a special mechanism, triggered by high surprise and emotional consequence, imprints the scene almost like a photograph, preserving incidental detail that ordinary memory would discard. Later work turned the construct into a testing ground for memory accuracy: Neisser and Harsch (1992), studying recollections of the Challenger disaster, showed that these confident memories can drift or become wholly false over time, and Talarico and Rubin (2003), tracking memories of September 11, found that flashbulb memories are held with high confidence yet lose consistency at roughly the same rate as everyday memories. What makes flashbulb memory a landmark construct is that it isolates the interplay of strong emotion, personal significance, and autobiographical recollection, letting researchers measure vividness and subjective confidence separately from objective accuracy.[1][2][3]

Unit
A type of autobiographical memory: one person's recollection of the circumstances in which they first learned a specific piece of shocking, consequential news
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Elicited by recall of the reception event soon after the news and again after a delay, comparing vividness and confidence ratings against the consistency or accuracy of the reported details

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Nearby constructs

memory6 fields · 18 citationsjingle · one name, six constructsemotion4 names · 4 citationsjangle · one word, rival theories of what it isaccuracy3 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, three constructs

References

  1. Brown, R., & Kulik, J. (1977). Flashbulb memories. Cognition, 5(1), 73–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(77)90018-x
  2. Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of “flashbulb” memories (pp. 9–31). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511664069.003
  3. Talarico, J. M., & Rubin, D. C. (2003). Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories. Psychological Science, 14(5), 455–461. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.02453

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