Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience

The chapter takes memory out of the laboratory and into everyday life, starting with the author's own recollection: hearing about the 9/11 attacks from a secretary while walking to his office, first imagining a small private plane had strayed off course, then phoning his wife and learning that the tower had collapsed. He asks readers the same questions: where were you, who told you? It is an excellent lead-in to «flashbulb memory», the concept Brown and Kulik proposed in 1977 on the basis of the Kennedy assassination: the circumstances in which we hear shocking, emotional news are supposedly burned into memory like a photograph.

The chapter's strength lies in how it tests this intuitive idea. Goldstein shows the weakness of Brown and Kulik's method: memories were collected years later, with no way of checking their accuracy. The answer is repeated recall. In Neisser and Harsch's Challenger study, students answered the same questions the day after the disaster and two and a half years later: one participant first wrote that they heard the news in a religion class, then later «remembered» watching it on TV in their dorm room with a roommate. The share saying they first heard it on TV rose from 21% to 45%. Talarico and Rubin's 9/11 study showed that flashbulb memories fade like ordinary ones, but people believe in them more.

The book is even-handed and presents contrary findings too: in Davidson and colleagues' study, a year later the consistency score for 9/11 memories was 0.77 versus 0.33 for an everyday event, and 35% of participants could not remember the everyday event at all. Goldstein discusses possible reasons for the difference and teaches readers not to rely on a single study — one of the textbook's most valuable qualities.

The next section turns to the constructive nature of memory. In Frederic Bartlett's classic experiment, published in 1932, participants read the Native Canadian tale «The War of the Ghosts» and retold it repeatedly; over time the story became shorter, distorted and, above all, adapted to the participants' own culture. Then come Elizabeth Loftus's famous experiments: people who had seen a stop sign said they had seen a yield sign after a misleading question; after a crash film, those asked with the word «smashed» estimated higher speeds, and a week later 32% «saw» broken glass that was never there — against 14% of those who heard «hit».

The practical climax of the chapter is eyewitness testimony. The book reminds us that DNA evidence had exonerated 248 wrongly convicted people in the US, most of whose convictions rested on mistaken eyewitness identification, and then explains how such errors arise from perception, memory and police procedures. The chapter also touches on the sensitive debate over memories of childhood abuse. The weak spot is the Turkish translation: Bartlett's name is consistently spelled «Barlett», and one figure caption reads «11 September 2011» — readers should watch for such small slips.

In the end, this chapter shows why the whole book is considered a classic: it asks questions from everyday life, explains classic experiments step by step, does not hide the limits of the findings, and teaches readers to look at their own memories with healthy scepticism. Although it is a textbook, the author's personal examples and «Something to Consider» sections keep the text alive. The book's size may be daunting, but reading just this chapter on memory can change the way you see yourself.

• «Method» and «Demonstration» boxes in every chapter
• Plenty of graphs, diagrams and photographs
• Test-yourself questions, summaries and key terms throughout and at the end of each chapter
• Everyday examples from the author's own life