Flashbulb memories: Special but not iconic

Memories associated with emotionally loaded events, often labelled Flashbulb Memories (FBM) (Brown and Kulik, 1977), have been attributed special status by memory researchers (Conway et al., 1994). These memories are thought to be more detailed and veridical than everyday memories and particularly immune from forgetting. Hence, it is implicitly assumed that they are processed by a distinct cognitive mechanism which records episodic details, including the relevant perceptual and spatio-temporal information (Kvavilashvili et al., 2003). The special status of FBM has been recently called into question by Talarico and Rubin (2003, 2007) who maintained that their only special status consists of the exceptionally high level of confidence (rather than consistency) that they entail. Moreover, several studies have shown that FBM decay at the same rate as non-FBM (Curci et al., 2001), and get similarly more inconsistent with time (Schmolck et al., 2000). FBM are also prone to recollection distortions (Pezdek, 2003) and to source monitoring errors (Crombag et al., 1996). Studies on FBM, supporting or denying their specificity, are not watertight because participants are often not selected for their involvement in the target event, thus differing for interest and coding of the event itself, suggestive questions are used, consistency is typically checked against previous testimonies accepted as gold standard, rather than against objective facts, and questions often probe knowledge of the event (and relative media coverage) rather than specific memories of it. Finally, participants in FBM research are usually asked to explicitly recollect marginal details using leading questions that may induce inferential processing, rather than open questions calling for spontaneous narratives. We are reporting observations capitalising from a source of FBM free from most of the above criticisms.