Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Neisser and Harsch (1992) Study On Flashbulb Memory

_______Neisser and Harsch (1992)______________________________

Aim: The aim of this study was see exactly how valid the concept of a Flashbulb memory is.

Procedure: To conduct this study, a questionnaire was given to 106 different participants the next day after the Challenger Space Shuttle Explosion. Some examples of the questions asked were Where were they (the participants), What where they doing, who told them, and at what it occurred. They later (3 years) sent out the same questionnaire to the same group and compared that to the original.


Findings: Even though these were thought to be flashbulb memories, the results showed that their memories did in fact fade from the time they took the questionnaire to the time they took it again later. They had originally had 220 facts but later were either completely or partially wrong on 150 of them. Even with these steep errors, the members where very confident about their correctness of their memory.

Conclusion: In the end, they figured that flashbulb memories really aren’t as vivid and correct as previously thought. They fade just as quickly as normal memories. The real only difference in these memories is that when someone thinks they have a flashbulb memory, they have very high confidence that they have all the details correct.

Limitations: Because this information was collected through a questionnaire, it is nearly impossible verify the precision of the reports.


 Links To info.


No comments:

Post a Comment