FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY: FLASHBULB MEMORIES

Courtrooms; eyewitnesses; jurors; trauma; assassination; terrorism; 9/11; brain anatomy

Last time I was preparing to testify in court, I was obliged to take a short course on withstanding cross-examination. It was exactly as much fun as you’d imagine. Two other psychologists were on the course as well. The lawyer in charge spoke briefly about eyewitness memory. He said what many people believe: that if we happen to witness very unusual - such as, say, a car covered with French flags speeding through a junction with a mountain lion on the roof - we’ll probably remember the event vividly and perfectly, even months later. Three psychologists glanced at each other and raised their eyebrows covertly. The lawyer was referring to ‘flashbulb memories’, which he seemed to consider a rather straightforward matter. We academics prefer our phenomena complex.

Writing about eyewitness memory as long ago as the 80s or 90s, psychologists used reliably to point out that it was much more fallible than jurors usually believe. In other words, jurors trusted eyewitnesses far more than they had any reason to (the phenomenon has changed now, as experts’ views have become more widely known). Literature of the period often dealt with the disparity - how to explain it? Perhaps jurors were thinking about certain events in their own lives that they remembered with a vividness that seemed almost perceptual. Examples might include the birth of a sibling or some sort of near-death experience. Maybe eyewitness memories were like that. Perhaps jurors thought they can trust them in proportion to how similar they were to their own memories of similar events. Perhaps jurors still think that.

Try recalling some highly-emotional experience from your own life. Alternatively, recall about some big public event that you’ve lived through: it might be the death of Princess Diana, the Twin Towers attacks in 2001, or the moment you learnt the outcome of last year’s presidential election. Do these memories seem different in quality from other memories of more quotidian events: sharper, clearer, brighter? I bet they do. As long ago as 1977, psychologists began to study exactly this phenomenon.

The classic example is the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. ‘Everyone knows what they were doing when they heard…’ Not just what they were doing, either, but also who told them, how they were feeling, and so on. They recall personal, idiosyncratic details: ‘I was carrying a carton of Viceroy cigarettes, which I dropped’.[i] One hallmark of flashbulb memories is the apparently perfect recollection of similar, tiny details.

Similar flashbulbs have been reported for events including the king of Belgium’s death, Margaret Thatcher’s resignation, the space shuttle disaster, and the fall of the Berlin wall.[ii]

Flashbulb memories, some have argued, are so different from the regular, everyday sort that they must involve special neural mechanisms. Perhaps ‘the highly emotional central event issues to the nervous system a kind of ‘Now print!’ order which results in […] vivid retention over many years, perhaps a lifetime…’[iii].

The idea certainly has intuitive appeal. But is it correct? Just about everyone has their own examples, which they enjoy relaying over the dinner table. I’d love to tell you where I was when I heard about Princess Diana or what tape was playing in my car when I had that horrible car crash. None of that adds up to serious scientific evidence, though. It’s easy to see why not. I might insist that I’m right and that time has not faded my memories in the least, but how could you possibly tell? Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I’m just remembering a dream I had. There’s simply no way to check.

From a scientific point of view, the best approach is to ‘identify a kind of research, not easily done, that badly needs to be done […] it is easy to conceive of such research in raw terms that committees watching over research on human subjects would not approve. Let there be more bloodied culprits and, just to raise the level a bit higher, let the seeming victim be a close friend of the witness. Alternatively, […] let a stranger pop his head into a room and shout “The President has been assassinated!”’[iv]

Naturally, psychologists are not allowed to do research like that, no matter how exciting its implications for the legal system. They have to think of something else. One method is to identify characteristics that flashbulb memories ought to have and see whether they really do.

Flashbulbs seem to have numerous elements in common. One of them - as far as we can tell - is consistency. Time may wither everything else, but it seems not to wither flashbulbs.[v] Ironically enough, psychologists’ findings on the topic are markedly inconsistent.

One team of psychologists found that memories of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation remained consistent, with little or no change, over a period of more than two years. Another group – acting fast – tested students’ memories for the previous day’s events on 12^th September 2001. They tested them again after periods of 7,42, and 224 days. While the memories did seem to remain vivid, they were no more consistent over time than any other kind of ordinary, humdrum memory.[vi] In the very title of their paper, the authors remarked that ‘Confidence, not consistency, characterises flashbulb memories’.

The researchers found that ‘students believed their memories of 9/11 were much more accurate than everyday memories even when both of those memories were inconsistent. Some not only forgot details that they initially reported, but they also introduced new details in subsequent retellings. Although they believed they were remembering how they heard the news exactly as it had happened, the objective reports refuted that subjective phenomenon.’[vii]

Confidence is one of the great determinants of eyewitness effectiveness. Jurors find it very convincing when eyewitnesses point to a defendant and say, ‘That was the man, I’ll never forget his face to my dying day’. Unfortunately, psychologists know that an eyewitness’ confidence is no indication of their accuracy.

It may not even be the event itself that witnesses are recalling. Let me explain. It seems that our memories of dramatic events (a Prime Minister’s resignation; a terrorist attack; a mugging) do not take on their final form straight away. These memories – which appear so distinct, solid, and reliable – are in fact rather malleable in the first few days after the event. They resemble jelly: you can mould them before they set. One important factor is repetition. How many times have you told other people where you were when, for instance, you heard that the Queen had died? What you remember today could well be a composite of the real event and your own vivid retellings. Maybe memories of mundane events seem less vivid for the simple reason that we recall them less frequently.

Although flashbulb memories have a reputation for durability, researchers suspect that may be an illusion. In fact, we seem to lose our flashbulbs at about the same rate as our common-or-garden memories for ordinary, everyday events. The boundary seems to lie at one year. If your flashbulb remains intact up to that point, it may well persist. For the period leading up to one year, though, flashbulb memories seem no more concrete than any other sort.[viii]

If flashbulbs really are special, you’d expect them to be associated with specific areas of the brain, different from those of everyday memories.[ix] The amygdalae are groups of neurones usually classified as part of the brain’s limbic system, or the ‘border’ around the brainstem. This system is associated with what we might call primal emotions - fear, shock, and so on. You can think of them as the emotions that keep you alive. The amygdalae seem to be involved with learning about fear, or about aversive events that threaten our survival.[x]

Notice how many flashbulbs concern negative events – murders, terrorist attacks, near-fatal accidents. They tend to involve horror, fright, nasty surprises. The amygdalae have been called a ‘rapid emotion detection system’.[xi] Patients who have suffered damage to them have significantly diminished quality of flashbulb memories.[xii]

Let’s finish with a study from New York University. It illustrates some of the points we’ve covered. The researcher, Tali Sharot, studied a group of participants who had been in Manhattan on 11^th September, 2001. They had either been in Midtown, some distance from the World Trade Center, or downtown and close by. No surprise that the memories recalled by the downtown group were more vivid and stronger, or that the witnesses themselves felt more confident in their recollections than the Midtown group. Under neuroimaging, the downtown group showed significantly greater activity in the amygdala.[xiii]

This is no great surprise as far as it goes. But there was another finding, a bit stranger. For the downtown group, activity was actually reduced in an area of the brain called the parahippocampal cortex. This is interesting because the structure is involved in our responses to ‘scenes and places’. And, yes, you read that correctly: activity there was reduced.[xiv] Someone recalling a traumatic event of the sort that produces a flashbulb memory may be unreliable when it comes to what forensic psychologists call ‘reception event details’ – scenes and places – which are the precise kind of information that the criminal justice system wants from them.

Thank you for reading this first Crime & Psychology newsletter of the year. If you enjoyed it, or learnt something interesting, I’d be very grateful if you’d bash a blue button or click Like. It really does help keep the newsletter going. I have all kinds of great material lined up for you this year, from super-villians to conspiracy theories to police interview techniques. Reserve your seat today and make sure you never miss out!

Crime & Psychology: all killer, no filler.

All images courtesy of WikiMedia Commons. References supplied partly out of academic habit, but also so you can chase up anything you find particularly interesting.

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[i] Brown, R & Kulik, J: ‘Flashbulb memories’, Cognition, 5, pp73-99, 1977

[ii] Martin G Neil, Carlson Neil R & Buskist William: Psychology – Fourth edition, Allyn & Bacon, Great Britain, 2010, p317

[iii] Brown, Roger: Social Psychology – The second edition, The Free Press, New York, 1986, p270

[iv] Brown, Roger, op cit, p273

[v] Eysenck, Michael W & Keane, Mark T: Cognitive Psychology – a student’s handbook, 6^th edition, Psychology Press, East Sussex, 2010, p294

[vi] Talarico JM & Rubin DC: ‘Confidence, not consistency, characterises flashbulb memories’, Psychological Science, 14, 2003, pp455-61

[vii] Sigafoos, Shannon: ‘Remembering 9/11: Are flashbulb memories accurate 20 years later?’, 7^th September 2021, Available at: Remembering 9/11: Are Flashbulb Memories Accurate 20 Years Later? · News · Lafayette College

[viii] Hirst W & Phelps EA: ‘Flashbulb Memories’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(1), 2016, pp 36-41.

[ix] Law BM: ‘Seared in our memories’, Monitor on Psychology, 42(8), 2011, p60.

[x] Gazzaniga, Michael S, Ivry, Richard B, Mangun, George R: Cognitive Neuroscience – The biology of the mind, 4^th edition, W W Norton, London, 2014, pp441-5

[xi] Gazzaniga, Michael S et al, op cit, p423

[xii] Spanhel Kerstin, Wagner Kathrin, Geiger Maximilian J., Ofer Isabell, Schulze-Bonhage Andreas& Metternich Birgitta: ‘Flashbulb memories: Is the amygdala central? An investigation of patients with amygdalar damage’, Neuropsychologia, Volume 111, 2018, pp163-171,

[xiii] Specifically, the left, rather than the right, amygdala, but we are not going to be technical on matters of neuroanatomy.

[xiv] Yong, Ed: ‘9/11 memories reveal how flashbulb memories are made in the brain’, National Geographic, October 14, 2008,Available at: 9/11 memories reveal how flashbulb memories are made in the brain