Potential flashbulbs: Memories of ordinary news as the baseline

Abstract

Some more or less ordinary memories On the evening of March 1, 1986, I was sitting at my portable computer just before going to bed. I was entering the following brief description into a database, adhering to a daily routine I had started on January 1 of that year: (1) When: 01.03.1986 What: Prime Minister murdered Who: Olof Palme Where: Stockholm DetailQ: How many shots hit him? DetailA: Two Source: Radio news, later “Politiken” (newspaper), TV, other papers ContextQ: What effects did it have for me? ContextA: I skipped breakfast and was 15 min late to pick up Pia. I was in the middle of the peaceful but tedious task of performing an experiment on my own memory. This terse record of a violent and quite upsetting event was part of the material that I would be probed about some months later by the computer and try to remember. Notice particularly that I included information on both the news itself and my personal circumstances, or context, when I first heard the news. There were other, equally upsetting, events in the database that I recorded during the 6 months of this diary keeping. Just 2 months later, this was entered: (2) When: 28.04.1986 What: Big nuclear accident, indicated by extremely radioactive cloud Who: Soviet power plant Where: Close to Kiev DetailQ: Where was the cloud first registered? DetailA: Sweden, 100 km north of Stockholm Source: Radio news, later TV evening news ContextQ: Where and when did I hear it first? ContextA: At Pia's place just after work; she w…