1 - Introduction

Summary

Dates are important in the study of “flashbulb memories.” President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 and Brown and Kulik asked people about their memories for that event in 1975 before publishing their famous article in 1977. The 12-year retention interval lent credibility to the claim of remarkable memory; it seemed unusual then, as it does now, for people to recall events with such vividness after so long a time. The flashbulb metaphor has remained controversial since Brown and Kulik coined it, and the explosion of the Challenger shuttle on January 28, 1986 provided an opportunity to examine it more closely. Several enterprising memory researchers independently set out to ask subjects to describe how they had heard the news of the shuttle disaster. Unlike earlier studies about the Kennedy assassination, these studies were undertaken within a short time after the event. Some researchers then waited months or years before questioning the same informants again.

This new wave of research on flashbulb memories has been designed to approach many of the questions raised by Brown and Kulik (1977) and by their critics. Because a number of investigators had been working independently on the same problem, a conference at which they could compare findings and discuss their implications for the relationship between affect and memory seemed appropriate. That conference was held at Emory University on February 2–3, 1990.