Final Memory

Flashbulb Memories

Vivid, detailed memories of highly emotional and significant events.

Special Mechanism Hypothesis

The theory that flashbulb memories are encoded via a unique, biologically-based mechanism due to emotional arousal.

Ordinary Mechanism Hypothesis

The idea that flashbulb memories result from standard memory processes like rehearsal, distinctiveness, and emotional salience.

Support for Ordinary Mechanism

Evidence that flashbulb memories change over time despite high confidence and that emotional content increases rehearsal, not accuracy.

Talarico & Rubin (2003)

Study comparing recall of flashbulb and everyday events, finding that accuracy of flashbulb memories declined over time like everyday memories while confidence remained high.

Own-Race Bias

The tendency for people to better recognize faces of their own race.

Fusiform Face Area (FFA)

A specialized brain area involved in face perception.

Prosopagnosia

Face blindness; the inability to recognize familiar faces due to damage, often in the FFA.

Correspondence

The accuracy of memory compared to the actual event.

Source Monitoring

Determining the origins of memories.

DRM Procedure

An experimental method in cognitive psychology used to study false memory formation by showing related words.

Imagination Inflation

The phenomenon where imagining events can increase the belief that they actually occurred.

Misinformation Effect

The distortion of memory due to misleading information presented after an event.

Estimator Variables

Uncontrollable factors that can affect eyewitness memory, such as lighting and stress.

Yerkes-Dodson Law

The principle that moderate arousal leads to optimal performance, while too much or too little arousal impairs it.

Easterbrook Hypothesis

The idea that stress narrows attention, leading to better memory of central details compared to peripheral ones.

Weapon Focus

The effect where the presence of a weapon draws attention away from other details.

Cognitive Interview

An interview technique designed for eyewitnesses using psychological principles to enhance recall.

Context Reinstatement

A component of the cognitive interview that uses the encoding specificity principle to enhance memory recall.

Hypermnesia

Memory improvement over repeated attempts to recall information.

Confabulation

The act of creating false memories without the intent to deceive.

False Memory Susceptibility

The tendency for about 25–30% of participants to remember false events.