Flashbulb Memory

Flashbulb memory describes the phenomenon in which people report unusually vivid, detailed, and confident recollections of the circumstances in which they learned of a highly significant event — where they were, what they were doing, who told them. The term was introduced by Roger Brown and James Kulik in 1977, who proposed that emotionally significant events trigger a special encoding mechanism producing near-photographic memory traces.

This proposal is empirically wrong. Repeated study of flashbulb memories — for events ranging from the assassination of a political leader to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster — demonstrates that they decay, distort, and incorporate post-event information at roughly the same rate as ordinary autobiographical memories. What distinguishes them is not their accuracy but their phenomenology: subjects are more confident in their flashbulb memories, experience them as more vivid, and hold them with greater subjective certainty than ordinary memories. The confidence and the vividness are real. The special accuracy they are taken to imply is not.

This dissociation between metacognitive confidence and actual accuracy is one of the clearest demonstrations that the phenomenology of remembering — the feeling that one is accurately accessing the past — is not a reliable indicator of whether one actually is. The emotional significance of an event enhances consolidation of the memory's existence without enhancing the accuracy of its content. We remember that we remember, without thereby remembering accurately what we remember.