Flashbulb Memories – Arizona Forensic Services, LLC

Snap Shot

The question: Are vivid, confident memories of learning about shocking news more accurate than ordinary memories, and what does that research say about a witness’s vivid, confident memory of a personally experienced event?

What the research shows: Memories of how people learned of events such as the Challenger explosion and the September 11 attacks change over time, often substantially in the first year, while vividness and confidence stay high; the consistency of these memories and of everyday memories declines at similar rates in several studies. Inconsistencies that enter the memory of one’s own circumstances tend to be repeated rather than corrected, whereas errors about public facts tended to be corrected, although some studies find flashbulb memories more consistent than control memories.

What it does not show: The research concerns the circumstances in which people heard news, not memory for a crime the person experienced, and it measures consistency between a person’s own reports rather than accuracy against an external record. It does not show that a particular witness’s vivid, confident memory is wrong, and it does not show that memories of central details of a personally experienced trauma decay in the same way.

The law: Expert testimony on flashbulb research is governed by Rule 702, Daubert, Kumho, and, in courts-martial, Houser; experts may explain the confidence–consistency research but may not opine on a particular witness’s credibility (Lindsey). Certainty is a reliability factor under Neil v. Biggers and Manson v. Brathwaite and in Arizona’s identification instruction, which refers to certainty at the pretrial identification.

Issues for each side: Prosecutors can show that vivid, emotional memories often keep their core and that early, documented accounts carry special weight, while recognizing that a witness’s present certainty does not show accuracy. Defense counsel can show that confidence and vividness can stay high as memory changes, while recognizing that the research concerns news events and measures consistency, not proof that any account is false.

Most adults can say where they were when they heard about the September 11 attacks, and many say they will never forget it. In 1977, two psychologists called such recollections flashbulb memories, on the theory that a surprising and consequential event could imprint the scene of its reception much as a camera flash preserves a photograph. Since then, researchers have repeatedly recorded people’s accounts soon after a dramatic public event and compared them with the same people’s accounts months or years later.

Flashbulb memory research reaches the courtroom because jurors, lawyers, and judges often share the intuition that a vivid, emotional, confidently held memory must be accurate. Witnesses to crimes, complainants, and accused persons often describe their memories that way. The flashbulb studies are among the most direct tests of that intuition, and their main finding, that the felt quality of a memory and its consistency over time can come apart, bears on how any confident account is weighed. The studies also have a narrow subject, the reception of news, and applying them to a personally experienced crime requires care.

This paper reviews the origin of the concept, the classic tests of it, the September 11 studies, the difference between hearing news and experiencing an event, and recent research, then the limits of the evidence and the governing federal, military, and Arizona law.

The Original Proposal

Brown and Kulik (1977) asked adults about the moment they learned of the assassination of President Kennedy and other shocking events. Most described where they were, who told them, and how they felt, often in detail out of proportion to the moment’s importance. The authors proposed that surprise combined with high personal consequence triggered a special mechanism that preserved the reception scene with unusual completeness and permanence, and they called the result a flashbulb memory. The proposal rested on the vividness of the reports themselves; no record existed against which to check them.

Testing the Photograph Metaphor

The test-retest method addressed that gap. On the morning after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, university students wrote down how they had heard the news. About two and a half years later, many of the same students gave accounts that differed substantially from what they had written, often while expressing high confidence, and some had difficulty accepting that their original records were accurate (Neisser & Harsch, 1992). College students asked three days after the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial how they had heard the news, and again 15 or 32 months later, showed a sharp change with the longer delay: half of the 15-month recollections were rated highly accurate and about one in ten contained major distortions, while at 32 months fewer than a third were highly accurate and more than 40% contained major distortions (Schmolck et al., 2000).

The most cited comparison used an everyday memory as a control. On September 12, 2001, 54 university students described how they first heard about the attacks and an ordinary event from the preceding days, then were retested 1, 6, or 32 weeks later. The consistency of both kinds of memory declined over time and did not differ, but ratings of vividness, recollection, and belief in the memory’s accuracy declined only for the everyday memories. The authors concluded that flashbulb memories are special in their perceived accuracy rather than their accuracy (Talarico & Rubin, 2003). A later study of the same kind, which followed participants over a year, found that the flashbulb memories also remained higher on other subjective qualities, which the authors characterized as a difference in phenomenology rather than accuracy (Talarico & Rubin, 2007).

Not every study points the same way. In a study of the resignation of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, more than 86% of participants in the United Kingdom, for whom the event was important, met the authors’ criteria for a flashbulb memory, with full and consistent reports of hearing the news nearly a year later, compared with fewer than 29% of participants outside the country; the importance participants attached to the event and their emotional response were the main predictors (Conway et al., 1994). Two studies of September 11 memories found them more vivid, detailed, and consistent than memories of a staged control event, even though the retest interval for the flashbulb memories was twice as long (Kvavilashvili et al., 2010).

The September 11 Ten-Year Study

A consortium of researchers surveyed more than 3,000 people in seven U.S. cities within about a week of September 11, 2001, asking both how they had learned of the attack (the flashbulb memory) and factual questions about the attack itself (event memory), with follow-up surveys at intervals reaching nearly three years (Hirst et al., 2009) and then ten years (Hirst et al., 2015). Both kinds of memory showed rapid forgetting in the first year, after which the curves leveled off and did not change significantly even after ten years. Confidence remained high throughout. Memory for the participants’ own emotional reactions was poorer than memory for features such as where they were and who told them (Hirst et al., 2009). After ten years, none of the factors examined, including media attention, discussion, residence in New York, personal loss, and emotional intensity, predicted flashbulb memory consistency, while media attention and conversation predicted the accuracy of event memory (Hirst et al., 2015).

Two further findings matter for evaluating testimony. First, inconsistencies that had entered a flashbulb memory tended to be repeated in later reports rather than corrected, whereas errors about facts of the event tended to be corrected, presumably because accurate public information was repeatedly available (Hirst et al., 2015). Second, a memory that has stabilized is not necessarily accurate; a version repeated many times can be stable and still differ from what the person first reported. In a review, two of the study’s leaders concluded that flashbulb memories do not require a special mechanism and involve both forgetting and distortion despite high confidence (Hirst & Phelps, 2016).

Confidence and Consistency

The research thus shows that the subjective strength of a memory and its consistency over time can diverge. A flashbulb memory can be vivid, emotionally significant, and held with certainty while differing in particulars from the person’s own earlier report. In the Talarico and Rubin (2003) study, the intensity of participants’ initial emotional reactions predicted their later belief in the memory’s accuracy but not its consistency, which suggests that the persisting confidence reflects the event’s emotional significance rather than preservation of detail. Brain-imaging research on September 11 memories is consistent with this account: three years after the attack, people who had been in lower Manhattan, close to the World Trade Center, recalled the day with greater vividness and showed selective activation of the amygdala during recall compared with people who had been a few miles away (Sharot et al., 2007). The study measured recall and brain activity three years after the attacks rather than comparing those memories with accounts recorded at the time, so it shows that personal proximity is associated with differences in how memories are experienced and processed, not that those memories were more or less accurate.

This finding concerns delayed confidence. It does not contradict research showing that an eyewitness’s confidence at an initial, fair, uncontaminated identification can be informative (see the Confidence and Accuracy paper); both lines of research agree that confidence expressed long after an event, after retelling, is a weak guide to accuracy.

Hearing the News Versus Living Through an Event

Most flashbulb studies concern the reception context, the circumstances in which a person learned of a public event that happened to someone else. Those circumstances are often peripheral to the person’s life: who was in the room, what the person was doing, where the person heard it. A crime witness or complainant is usually reporting the event itself, in which the person was a participant, and the details in dispute may be central to that experience. Research on personally experienced trauma suggests that the central content of such memories can be retained well. In a community sample of 52 adults who had recently experienced a traumatic event, memories of the trauma were more consistent across two interviews about three months apart than memories of a positive emotional experience (Peace & Porter, 2004). In the September 11 studies, event memory, which was regularly reinforced by accurate public information, behaved differently from flashbulb memory (Hirst et al., 2015).

A recent study blurred the line between public and personal. Students at one college reported, shortly after and about two months after, how they learned that their campus was closing because of COVID-19, an announcement that directly changed their lives. Their memories of hearing the news were more consistent over time than control memories from the same week, and confidence did not differ between the two kinds of memory (Xuan et al., 2025). The pattern may differ when the event directly affects the person, although the delay was short and the event far from a crime.

Trauma memories are not immune to change (see the Emotion, Stress, Trauma, and Memory paper), but the flashbulb findings cannot be transferred to a personally experienced event without asking whether the disputed detail is central or peripheral, how long ago the event occurred, and how often the account has been retold.

Recent Research, 2020–2026

A review of 57 test-retest studies of flashbulb memories for public events found substantial differences in the events, populations, retention intervals, and scoring methods used, and concluded that this heterogeneity may account for much of the disagreement about whether flashbulb memories are special; a detailed comparison of September 11 studies suggested that their conclusions depended partly on method (Frinco et al., 2024). An integrative review addressed to courts noted that the qualities jurors and judges use to judge a memory, such as consistency, confidence, and amount of detail, are the same qualities the flashbulb literature has studied, and argued for expert input and updated guidance for factfinders rather than fixed rules (Curci et al., 2020). In an experiment testing whether a standard flashbulb memory checklist could separate true memories of negative personal events from fabricated ones, checklist scores were informative but did not allow adequate discrimination between the two (Battista et al., 2025).

Limits of the Evidence

Most flashbulb studies use university students or volunteers recalling how they learned of news, not participants in a crime, and the people studied had no stake in their accounts. The standard measure is consistency between a person’s first and later reports. The first report is itself a memory, usually collected a day to a week after the event, and may contain errors; consistency is therefore a proxy for accuracy, not a measure of it. A consistent memory may be consistently wrong, and an inconsistent one may have become more accurate. Results depend on the delay, the event, and how changes are scored (Frinco et al., 2024). Above all, group findings describe tendencies across many people; they cannot show whether a particular witness’s memory is accurate.

Questions to Ask About This Research

When Talarico and Rubin (2003) or Hirst et al. (2015) is cited to show that vivid memories are unreliable, counsel should ask what was measured: consistency between a person’s own reports of how the person heard news, not accuracy about an event the person experienced, and whether the disputed detail in this case is central to the witness’s experience or peripheral, like most reception details. When Neisser and Harsch (1992) or Schmolck et al. (2000) is cited, counsel should ask about the delay, because Schmolck et al. found distortion increasing markedly between 15 and 32 months while Hirst et al. (2015) found little change after the first year, and should ask how long after the event and after how many retellings the witness’s account was given. When studies finding consistent flashbulb memories, such as Conway et al. (1994), Kvavilashvili et al. (2010), or Xuan et al. (2025), are offered to support a witness’s memory, counsel should ask whether consistency was the measure and whether the conditions resemble this case. In either direction, counsel should ask whether the witness’s earliest recorded account is available for comparison. These questions are explained in “Reading Research Claims: A Guide for Attorneys” on this site.

Flashbulb Memories and the Law

Federal and Military Standards

Expert testimony about flashbulb memory research is governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 702, as amended December 1, 2023, which requires the proponent to show that it is more likely than not that the testimony rests on sufficient facts or data and reliable methods reliably applied. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) made the trial judge a gatekeeper, and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1999) extended the gatekeeping obligation to all expert testimony, including testimony based on technical or other specialized knowledge. The research usually enters through general testimony that vividness and later confidence do not establish accuracy. When identification is at issue, the due process cases list the witness’s level of certainty at the confrontation as one reliability factor (Neil v. Biggers, 1972; Manson v. Brathwaite, 1977), and when police did not arrange suggestive circumstances, reliability is tested through cross-examination, instructions, and expert testimony (Perry v. New Hampshire, 2012). In courts-martial, Military Rule of Evidence 702 tracks the federal rule, admissibility is assessed under the six factors of United States v. Houser (1993), and under Military Rule of Evidence 1102 the 2023 federal amendment took effect in the military rule in 2025 (Joint Service Committee on Military Justice, 2025); practitioners should confirm current text.

Arizona

Arizona Rule of Evidence 702 adopted the Daubert standard effective January 1, 2012, and was amended effective January 1, 2024, to track the 2023 federal amendment (Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004). State v. Chapple (1983), Arizona’s leading case on expert testimony about eyewitness memory, held that excluding such testimony was an abuse of discretion on its facts; admission otherwise rests in the trial court’s discretion (State v. Nordstrom, 2001). Experts may describe research on memory but may not opine on whether a particular witness, or a class of witnesses, is telling the truth (State v. Lindsey, 1986, 149 Ariz. at 475). Arizona’s identification instruction asks jurors to consider, among other factors, the witness’s level of certainty at the time of the pretrial identification (RAJI (Criminal) Standard Criminal 45), a focus on early rather than later certainty that is consistent with the research.

Special Issues in Legal Practice

The principles described above apply with equal force to every party in a legal proceeding. The science operates the same way regardless of who is asking the questions, and the research summarized here does not by itself favor either side. What differs between the parties is not the science but the vantage point — the particular places where these issues tend to surface, and the particular errors each party is best positioned to guard against. The two summaries below identify those recurring issues. They are offered for orientation, not as litigation strategy; in every case the controlling question is what the evidence in that case will, and will not, support, and the expert’s role is to inform the trier of fact rather than to advocate for either side.

Special Issues for Prosecutors

The research supports several propositions prosecutors can legitimately present. The flashbulb studies concern memory for how people heard news, usually peripheral details, and do not show that the central content of a personally experienced event decays in the same way; memories of personal trauma have been found more consistent than other emotional memories over a few months (Peace & Porter, 2004), and some flashbulb studies found high consistency when the event mattered to the person. Changes in peripheral details between accounts are what the research predicts for anyone and are not, by themselves, evidence of fabrication, and a witness’s earliest documented account is valuable precisely because later retellings can drift. Prosecutors can preserve that value by recording early statements and documenting what the witness later learned.

The research also counsels caution. A witness’s present certainty, vividness, and conviction that the event could never be forgotten do not establish that the details are accurate, and argument that relies on those qualities overstates what the research supports. Stability across recent retellings is not proof of accuracy, because repeated errors can also be stable, and when a disputed detail first appears or changes after the earliest account, the factfinder is entitled to weigh that sequence. The same limits apply to a confident identification made long after the event.

Special Issues for Defense

The research supports several propositions defense counsel can legitimately present. Vivid, confident memories of dramatic events have repeatedly been found to change over time, sometimes substantially, while confidence stays high (Hirst et al., 2015; Neisser & Harsch, 1992; Talarico & Rubin, 2003), and inconsistencies that enter the memory of one’s own circumstances tend to be repeated rather than corrected, whereas errors about public facts tended to be corrected (Hirst et al., 2015). Distortion can increase with longer delays (Schmolck et al., 2000), and checklist scores were informative but did not discriminate adequately between true and fabricated memories in a recent experiment (Battista et al., 2025). Expert testimony explaining these points, together with a comparison of the witness’s earliest and later accounts, is a legitimate way to help the factfinder.

The research also counsels caution about the limits that apply to the defense. The studies concern the reception of news and measure consistency, not accuracy about a personally experienced crime, and the core of a significant experience is often, but not always, well retained; that does not tell us whether a particular account is accurate, because details, context, and source are what change. The research cannot show that a particular memory is mistaken, and an expert may not say so. Changes in peripheral details do not show that the core of an account is wrong or that a witness is untruthful; memory change is not lying. The same principles apply to the accused’s own confident recollection, which may also have drifted since the events.

This paper is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice. The author is a psychologist, not an attorney; summaries of law are general and must be verified against current authority or with a licensed attorney.

References

Battista, F., Lanciano, T., Mangiulli, I., Gattulli, V., Impedovo, D., & Curci, A. (2025). A study on the use of flashbulb memories features to discriminate true from fabricated autobiographical memories for negative events. Scientific Reports, 15(1), Article 25599. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-10640-8

Brown, R., & Kulik, J. (1977). Flashbulb memories. Cognition, 5(1), 73–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(77)90018-X

Conway, M. A., Anderson, S. J., Larsen, S. F., Donnelly, C. M., McDaniel, M. A., McClelland, A. G. R., Rawles, R. E., & Logie, R. H. (1994). The formation of flashbulb memories. Memory & Cognition, 22(3), 326–343. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200860

Curci, A., Lanciano, T., Curtotti, D., & Sartori, G. (2020). Lessons for the courtroom from the study of flashbulb memory: An integrative review. Memory, 28(3), 441–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2020.1727522

Frinco, R., Muzzulini, B., Tinti, C., Luminet, O., & Schmidt, S. (2024). A review of longitudinal studies on flashbulb memories. Where we started, are, and are going? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 38(4), Article e4233. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4233

Hirst, W., & Phelps, E. A. (2016). Flashbulb memories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(1), 36–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415622487

Hirst, W., Phelps, E. A., Buckner, R. L., Budson, A. E., Cuc, A., Gabrieli, J. D. E., Johnson, M. K., Lustig, C., Lyle, K. B., Mather, M., Meksin, R., Mitchell, K. J., Ochsner, K. N., Schacter, D. L., Simons, J. S., & Vaidya, C. J. (2009). Long-term memory for the terrorist attack of September 11: Flashbulb memories, event memories, and the factors that influence their retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(2), 161–176. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015527

Hirst, W., Phelps, E. A., Meksin, R., Vaidya, C. J., Johnson, M. K., Mitchell, K. J., Buckner, R. L., Budson, A. E., Gabrieli, J. D. E., Lustig, C., Mather, M., Ochsner, K. N., Schacter, D., Simons, J. S., Lyle, K. B., Cuc, A. F., & Olsson, A. (2015). A ten-year follow-up of a study of memory for the attack of September 11, 2001: Flashbulb memories and memories for flashbulb events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(3), 604–623. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000055

Joint Service Committee on Military Justice. (2025). Amendments to the Military Rules of Evidence since 1984 (G. E. Maggs, Ed.; 2025 ed.). https://jsc.defense.gov/Portals/99/MRE%20Amendments%202025.pdf

Kvavilashvili, L., Mirani, J., Schlagman, S., Erskine, J. A. K., & Kornbrot, D. E. (2010). Effects of age on phenomenology and consistency of flashbulb memories of September 11 and a staged control event. Psychology and Aging, 25(2), 391–404. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017532

Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of “flashbulb” memories (pp. 9–31). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511664069.003

Peace, K. A., & Porter, S. (2004). A longitudinal investigation of the reliability of memories for trauma and other emotional experiences. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18(9), 1143–1159. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1046

Schmolck, H., Buffalo, E. A., & Squire, L. R. (2000). Memory distortions develop over time: Recollections of the O.J. Simpson trial verdict after 15 and 32 months. Psychological Science, 11(1), 39–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00212

Sharot, T., Martorella, E. A., Delgado, M. R., & Phelps, E. A. (2007). How personal experience modulates the neural circuitry of memories of September 11. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(1), 389–394. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0609230103

Talarico, J. M., & Rubin, D. C. (2003). Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories. Psychological Science, 14(5), 455–461. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.02453

Talarico, J. M., & Rubin, D. C. (2007). Flashbulb memories are special after all; in phenomenology, not accuracy. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21(5), 557–578. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1293

Xuan, Y., Greenberg, M., Umanath, S., & Coane, J. H. (2025). Flashbulb and first-hand memories for campus closings due to COVID-19: Consistency and change. Memory, 33(1), 84–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2024.2404499

Legal Authorities

Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).

Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999).

Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98 (1977).

Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188 (1972).

Perry v. New Hampshire, 565 U.S. 228 (2012).

State v. Chapple, 135 Ariz. 281, 660 P.2d 1208 (1983).

State v. Lindsey, 149 Ariz. 472, 720 P.2d 73 (1986).

State v. Nordstrom, 200 Ariz. 229, 25 P.3d 717 (2001).

United States v. Houser, 36 M.J. 392 (C.M.A. 1993).

Fed. R. Evid. 702.

Ariz. R. Evid. 702.

Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004 (amending Ariz. R. Evid. 702, effective Jan. 1, 2024).

Mil. R. Evid. 702.

Mil. R. Evid. 1102.

Revised Arizona Jury Instructions (Criminal), Standard Criminal 45 (Identification).

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