Now if we extrapolated from those sorts of findings to, for example, someone witnessing a crime, we might expect exactly the same sort of pattern that is that immediately after the crime you’re starting to forget details of it. But after a few months that stabilises and what’s left seems to stay there for a very very long time. The main finding, here’s really quite an interesting one, and that is that there is a fairly rapid decline in the information you can recall. The most recent event that this has been done for is the people’s memories for learning about 9/11. The classic one being the assassination of the American President John F Kennedy, but more recently people have looked at memory for the space shuttle disaster, testing people’s memories within a few days of that being shown on television, and then testing their memories at delays of two, three and even four years. These are memories for major public events, but they’re curious memories because they’re memories about where you were and what you were doing and who you were with when you first heard about the public event.

Martin Conway: There have been some studies of what is sometimes called flashbulb memories.

Flashbulb memory