Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy.
Department of Psychology, City University of London, London, UK.
Memory. 2020 Jul;28(6):766-782. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2020.1778035. Epub 2020 Jun 17.
Since Brown and Kulik's (1977. Flashbulb memories. , 5, 73-99. http://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(77)90018-X) seminal work, a central issue in memory literature is whether flashbulb memories (FBMs) hold a special status within autobiographical recalls. To address this issue, we refer back to Brown and Kulik's definition of FBM as a of the reception context of an important public news and propose a method to identify the contents of this snapshot. Although Brown and Kulik found that the majority of FBM's contents could be classified within six canonical categories (CCs), here we claim that assessing the presence of FBMs through guided CCs' questions - as done by most researchers in this field - can be misleading. We suggest, instead, to use free recall reports to identify the consistent perceptual elements of the snapshot. Across two test-retest studies, we show that the contents of FBMs assessed by free reports and the contents of CCs assessed by guided questions, do not exactly coincide. Moreover, a structural equation model supports results of previous research about the determinants of FBM and reveals that FBM facilitates the recall of more consistent explicitly requested CCs' contents. Theoretical implications concerning the qualitative contents of FBMs and the debate about their consistency are discussed.
自布朗和库里克（1977 年，闪光灯记忆，5，73-99。http://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(77)90018-X）的开创性工作以来，记忆文献中的一个核心问题是闪光灯记忆（FBMs）在自传体回忆中是否具有特殊地位。为了解决这个问题，我们回顾了布朗和库里克对 FBM 的定义，即重要公共新闻接收背景的快照，并提出了一种识别该快照内容的方法。尽管布朗和库里克发现大多数 FBM 的内容可以归类为六个典型类别（CCs），但我们在这里声称，通过引导 CC 问题评估 FBM 的存在——这是该领域的大多数研究人员所做的——可能会产生误导。我们建议，相反，使用自由回忆报告来识别快照的一致感知元素。在两项测试-再测试研究中，我们表明，通过自由报告评估的 FBM 内容和通过引导问题评估的 CC 内容不完全吻合。此外，结构方程模型支持了先前关于 FBM 决定因素的研究结果，并表明 FBM 有助于回忆更一致的明确要求的 CC 内容。讨论了关于 FBM 的定性内容和关于它们的一致性的争论的理论意义。
