Flashbulb Memories
by Brown & Kulik
Heaven, Jenna and Jong Kwan
What is flashbulb memory?
• It was suggested by Brown and Kulik in 1977
• A kind of emotional memory
• Vivid and detailed memories of highly
emotional events
• Recorded in the brain like a camera’s flash
• Formed instantaneously and remembered
forever, after experiencing shocking events
Brown and Kulik’s Experiment
• Clear memories of actions, emotions, and place
• Many recalled flashbulb memories of personal
events
• Emotional events are better remembered than
less emotional events, due to special neural
mechanism
• Events are better remembered when there is a
high level of emotional arousal at the time of the
notification of an event, and the surprise
following it.
Neisser’s suggestion
• People do not always know that an event is
important until later
• Flashbulb memories are governed by a
storytelling schema following a specific
structure
• Neisser and Harsch’s investigation in 1992
about people’s memory accuracy
• Neisser argued that these memories are often
inaccurate and fabricated