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.

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The BBC television programme Right Hand, Left Hand, broadcast in August 1953, used a postal questionnaire to ask viewers about their handedness. Respondents were born between 1864 and 1948, and in principle therefore the study provides information on rates of left-handedness in those born in the nineteenth century, a group for which few data are otherwise available. A total of 6,549 responses were received, with an overall rate of left-handedness of 15.2%, which is substantially above that expected for a cohort born in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Left-handers are likely to respond preferentially to surveys about handedness, and the extent of over-response can be estimated in modern control data obtained from a handedness website, from the 1953 BBC data, and from Crichton-Browne's 1907 survey, in which there was also a response bias. Response bias appears to have been growing, being relatively greater in the most modern studies. In the 1953 data there is also evidence that left-handers were more common among later rather than early responders, suggesting that left-handers may have been specifically recruited into the study, perhaps by other left-handers who had responded earlier. In the present study the estimated rate of bias was used to correct the nineteenth-century BBC data, which was then combined with other available data as a mixture of two constrained Weibull functions, to obtain an overall estimate of handedness rates in the nineteenth century. The best estimates are that left-handedness was at its nadir of about 3% for those born between about 1880 and 1900. Extrapolating backwards, the rate of left-handedness in the eighteenth century was probably about 10%, with the decline beginning in about 1780, and reaching around 7% in about 1830, although inevitably there are many uncertainties in those estimates. What does seem indisputable is that rates of left-handedness fell during most of the nineteenth century, only subsequently to rise in the twentieth century.

An investigation of ninety-five university admission candidates failed to replicate the finding by Yin of a negative correlation between the ability to recognise upright and inverted faces. A zero correlation was obtained when unknown faces were both learned and recognised upside down, but when well-known faces were presented normally and upside down for identification, a significant positive correlation appeared. Rock has suggested that inverted faces are difficult to recognise because they overtax a mechanism for correcting disoriented stimuli. This explanation satisfactorily accounts for the data with the proviso that, when inverted faces are to be remembered, the best strategy is not to attempt to correct their orientation, but to learn isolated features of the face. This describes the data more parsimoniously than Yin's face-specific mechanism.

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