Neisser and Harsch also conducted an experiment when questioning the effectiveness of flashbulb memory. In 1992, they asked 106 participants to answer questions about the circumstances of their learning of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Among the questions, five asked about how they heard the news: where they were, what they were doing, who told them, what time it occurred, and so on. Thirty-two months later the participants were asked to answer the same questions again, and their results compared to the original.On the day after the disaster, 21% of the participants stated that they heard about the event on T.V. However, after thirty-two months, the percentage rose to 45%. The findings showed that memories had in fact dimmed, yet the participants were not aware, and still very confident about the accuracy of their questions. This suggests that flashbulb memory is not reliable. From this study we can see that what is different between normal memories and flashbulb memories, is most likely the confidence that people have in their memories associated with significant events.One weakness of this study is the fact that there was no control group in the experiment. This is a significant downside, as you cannot make a comparison between normal memories and flashbulb memories.
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