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A large group of subjects took part in a multinational test-retest study to investigate the formation of flashbulb (FB) memories for learning the news of the resignation of the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Over 86% of the U.K. subjects were found to have FB memories nearly 1 year after the resignation; their memory reports were characterized by spontaneous, accurate, and full recall of event details, including minutiae. In contrast, less than 29% of the non-U.K. subjects had FB memories 1 year later; memory reports in this group were characterized by forgetting, reconstructive errors, and confabulatory responses. A causal analysis of secondary variables showed that the formation of FB memories was primarily associated with the level of importance attached to the event and level of affective response to the news. These findings lend some support to the study by R. Brown and Kulik (1977), who suggest that FB memories may constitute a class ofautobiograpmcal memories distinguished by some form ofpreferential encoding.In this paper we present findings from a large-scale multinational test-retest study of flashbulb (FB) memories for the abrupt and unexpected resignation of the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The resignation provided a unique opportunity to examine FB memories (R. Brown & Kulik:, 1977) in groups of U.K. and non-U.K. nationals. The primary purpose of the study was to investigate the determinants of FB memories, and measures were taken of the variables affecting encoding and rehearsal. We planned to explore the structural relations between encoding factors such as affect, prior knowledge, and consequentiality, and the postencoding factor of rehearsal, for both FB and non-FB memories. Before turning to details of the study, we frrst consider R. Brown and Kulik's original proposals regarding the formation of FB memories and then review other studies of FB memories.

Five experiments investigated the influence of picture processing on recollective experience in recognition memory. Subjects studied items that differed in visual or imaginal detail, such as pictures versus words and high-imageability versus low-imageability words, and performed orienting tasks that directed processing either toward a stimulus as a word or toward a stimulus as a picture or image. Standard effects of imageability (e.g., the picture superiority effect and memory advantages following imagery) were obtained only in recognition judgments that featured recollective experience and were eliminated or reversed when recognition was not accompanied by recollective experience. It is proposed that conscious recollective experience in recognition memory is cued by attributes of retrieved memories such as sensory-perceptual attributes and records of cognitive operations performed at encoding.

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Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that self-reference at encoding increases the probability of recollective experience in recognition memory. In all three experiments separate groups of subjects studied words naming personality traits. One group judged the self-relevance of the traits, the other groups performed orientating tasks low in self-reference. In a recognition test subjects 6rst identified old items and then indicated which of these were accompanied by recollective experience ('remember' responses) and which were recognized on some other basis ('know' responses). No reliable differences in overall recognition performance between self-referent and semantic encoding tasks were observed. However, subjects who encoded trait adjectives with reference to the self produced reliably more remember responses and few know responses than subjects who had encoded the items in the low self-referent tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated a self-reference effect in recognition accompanied by recollective experience after 1-hour retention interval, while Experiment 2 found this effect to persist over a 24-hour retention interval. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this self-reference effect is obtained under incidental as well as under intentional learning conditions. Taken together these findings demonstrate the importance of self-reference as a factor in determining the likelihood that recognition judgements will be accompanied by recollective experience.The self plays a critical role in the formation, organization, and retrieval of memories (Brown ). But the very intricacy and complexity of the relationship between self and memory has meant that isolating effects of the self upon memory has proved particularly difficult. One effect that has, none the less, received considerable attention is the self-reference effect (SRE), which is observed when the degree of self-reference of to-be-remembered materials is varied. Interest in this area stemmed largely from a study by Rogers et al. (1977) in which a self-reference condition was added to a standard levels-of-processing

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