ABSTRACT
The observation that some events are more memorable than others, and that some of the events on the high side of the memorability distribution are important news events, is the empirical basis of the flashbulb memory (FBM) phenomenon. As a scientific finding, it is trivial. Of course events vary in how memorable they are (and hence have a distribution), and no prizes are won for saying that some of the events that occur throughout this distribution, including the most memorable end, are news events. There are some interesting scientific questions that can be asked about FBMs, but these questions must go beyond this initial observation. Many FBM studies fail to address the more interesting questions because the way the initial FBM research (Brown & Kulik, 1977) was carried out prompted many subsequent researchers to design studies that are not appropriate to answer many of the interesting questions. Many (not all) of the scientific questions of interest to cognitive researchers about FBMs are causal, while the methods used in the prototypical FBM study are more appropriate for addressing associative questions. Further, the methods that tend to be used are well suited for differentiating among people and groups, which is arguably of more interest to sociologists, oral historians, and social psychologists than to cognitive psychologists, who are usually more interested in differences between situations and tasks (Wright & Gaskell, 1995).
