Title: Seared in our memories
Headings: Seared in our memories
Cover Story
Seared in our memories
Opportunity—and guilt
Faulty flashbulbs?
Etched by emotion
Further reading

Content: It turned out that the rate of forgetting for both types of memory slowed and stabilized after a year. But overall flashbulb recollections declined more than factual recollections, possibly because nonstop media coverage bolstered people's factual memories ( see sidebar ). "What we're really looking at in flashbulb studies is consistency of people's stories, and we found a dramatic inconsistency in what people report after one week and after 36 months," Hirst says of the results, which were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Vol. 138, No. 2). " People are changing who they were with, how they found out about the attacks, those sorts of aspects." Forty percent of the time people misremember some aspect of their 9/11 experience, the study indicates. And the part they get the most wrong is how they felt. "You tend to project your current feelings about 9/11 on what you felt then," explains Hirst. "