Ulric Neisser
Ulric Neisser
Ulric Neisser
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would, and indeed continues to do so. To be sure it has not been universally popular: a 1989<br />
paper by Banaji and Crowder even argued that the study of "everyday memory" was "bankrupt."<br />
I was delighted to see their critique. If someone takes the trouble to attack an enterprise in print,<br />
it must be important!<br />
The Emory Cognition Project<br />
Not long after Memory Observed, an exploratory phone call came from Emory University<br />
in Atlanta: would I be interested in a chaired professorship? In a major-league city? The offer<br />
was generous and the timing was good: after sixteen years at Cornell I was ready for something<br />
new. But what would I do there? Thinking that it might be time to try something institutional, I<br />
asked Emory for the support of what I would call the "Emory Cognition Project." The Project<br />
would be housed in its own seminar room, accumulate a modest journal library, and exist chiefly<br />
to sponsor speakers and hold conferences. It was a modest request, but I couldn't think of<br />
anything else to ask for. Everything went smoothly, and Arden and I moved to Atlanta in the fall<br />
of 1983.<br />
In thirteen years at Emory, I developed various new interests and organized various<br />
relevant conferences. Through Cambridge University Press, many of those conferences became<br />
books in a series called "Emory Symposia in Cognition." I was the editor of the first Symposium,<br />
Concepts and Conceptual development (1987). The second (co-edited with Gene Winograd) was<br />
Remembering Reconsidered (1988), an attempt to reconcile the ecological and traditional<br />
approaches to memory. I had little contact with the third, Knowing and Remembering in Young<br />
Children (1990), which was organized and edited by my Emory colleague Robyn Fivush. Before<br />
listing the remaining volumes, I must describe some other developments.<br />
In the early 1980s, an epidemic of apparent child abuse swept across the United States:<br />
several falsely-accused day-care providers even went to prison on the basis of utterly fantastic<br />
testimony given by very young children. This was soon followed by an equally crazy epidemic<br />
of memory: adults in therapy (mostly women) suddenly "recovered" memories of how - as<br />
children - they had been sexually abused by members of their families. Because it was generally<br />
believed that really vivid memories could not be false, the desperate denials of accused family<br />
members carried little weight. Eventually some accused parents in Philadelphia responded by<br />
organizing the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), a support group for people who<br />
find themselves falsely accused in this way. Because I was one of the few psychologists who had<br />
actually written about false memories (in Memory Observed), Martin Orne asked me to serve on<br />
the Foundation's Board of Scientific Advisers. I was happy to do so, and indeed am still a<br />
member of that Board. Lacking any clinical expertise my contributions to the enterprise were<br />
necessarily limited, but I did present occasional talks on these issues in the mid-1980s.<br />
Fortunately the false memory epidemic has now subsided, partly as a result of the excellent work<br />
of the FMSF. Today, claims of sudden adult recovery of long-forgotten childhood abuse are<br />
usually met with appropriate skepticism.<br />
Flashbulb memories revisited<br />
Meanwhile, a completely unexpected event rekindled my interest in the old problem of<br />
"flashbulb memories." The event was the disastrous explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on<br />
January 28, 1986. While taking a shower the next morning (at least, that's what I remember!), it<br />
occurred to me that the occasion of hearing about such a disaster might become a "flashbulb<br />
memory" for many people. This was therefore an opportunity to get baseline accounts of such<br />
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