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The Red and Black • Thursday, January 25, 1990 • 3
‘Flashbulb’ memory not accurate
The Associated Press
ATLANTA — Many people insist they remember
nuii w ^ ere they were when the space shuttle
Challenger exploded four yeare ago Sunday, but
Ulric Neisser knows they're wrong.
And the “father of cognitive psychology" has their
handwritten accounts of the day to prove it.
‘This really surprised me," said Neisser, a
member of the National Academy of Sciences who pi
oneered the psychology of how people handle infor
mation. “I suspected they wouldn’t be 100 percent
accurate, but I never thought they’d be this wrong."
When Neisser heard that the Challenger had ex
ploded on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, he decided
that surveying Emory students could help test the
accuracy of “flashbulb memories."
The term, coined by Harvard psychologist Roger
Brown, describes the vivid and detailed memories of
important and emotional events. In the 1970s,
Brown wrote that events such as the assassination of
John F. Kennedy are recorded by a quasi-photo
graphic mechanism in the brain.
The morning after the Challenger explosion,
Neisser asked 100 students to record how, where and
when they heard the news, who told them and how
they felt.
In the fall of 1988, and again in spring 1989, he
and Emory graduate student Nicole Harsch tracked
down 44 of the students and interviewed them,
scoring responses on a 7-point scale of accuracy.
In the first interviews, 11 were “dead wrong" and
only three received the highest score, 7.
In the spring 1989 interviews, when Neisser gave
the students hints and eventually showed them their
reports, 12 students received a score of 0.
Bush supports Soviet action
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - President
Bush expressed hope Wednesday
that Mikhail S. Gorbachev “not
only survives but stays strong" in
the face of “enormous" problems.
He declined comment on whether
the Soviet leader has gone too far
in trying to quell civil strife in
Azerbaijan.
“Anytime you have a use of force
and the loss of life, we are con
cerned. But I don’t believe I can
judge that question right now,"
Bush said of the Soviet crackdown
on rioting in the largely Moslem
Soviet republic.
Gorbachev ordered thousands of
Soviet troops into Azerbaijan last
week to stop anti-Armenian rioting
and restore order. The military
killed dozens of people Saturday in
storming the capital city of Baku.
With the strife in Azerbaijan
and demands for independence
from the Baltic states of Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia, Bush said Gor
bachev is “faced with an ethnic
problem here and an internal
problem of enormous dimensions."
Bush said he “can’t make predic
tions" about Gorbachev’s chances
of surviving the challenges, but
added: “I hope he not only survives
but stays strong. Because I think it
is in our interest that perestroika
succeed and go forward."
The United States regards the
Soviet Union’s annexation of the
Baltic states a half-century ago as
illegal, and Bush said he and Gor
bachev discussed the U.S. position
at last month’s Malta summit.
But he said he did not want “to
fine-tune all that," emphasizing in
stead that what “we want to do is
to encourage Mr. Gorbachev’s
stand that peaceful change is the
order of the day."
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Focus of mail-bomb probe
files papers in appeals court
The Associated Press
ATLANTA — Legal papers filed
bv Robert Wayne O’Ferrell, the Al
abama man whose property is the
focus of an FBI investigation of re
cent mail bombings, indicate frus
tration with corporate power and a
“corrupt" legal system he believed
did him wrong.
But they do not touch on racial
issues, believed by many to have
inspired the bombings that
claimed two lives.
O’Ferrell described the docu
ment as a brief and filed it with the
11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
in 1988.
The Atlanta-based appeals court
last April upheld a lower court
ruling that threw out O’Ferrell’s
lawsuit against Gulf Life Insur
ance Co., which fired him in 1985.
The appeals court’s decision was
signed by three judges including
Robert Vance, who was killed Dec.
16 by a mail bomb delivered to his
Mountain View, Ala., home.
The FBI has searched O’FerreU’s
south Alabama home and salvage
store and dug up two septic tanks,
but it has not implicated O’Ferrell,
who has denied wrongdoing, as a
suspect. Investigators say he is one
of a number of people being ques
tioned in the slayings of Vance and
Savannah lawyer Robert Robinson,
who was killed by a mail bomb Dec.
18. No one has been charged.
A letter sent to an Atlanta tele
vision station, signed by “Ameri
cans for a Competent Federal
Judicial System," claimed the
bombings were a retaliation for
what the letter called court le
niency to blacks who commit
crimes against whites.
O’FerreH’s court documents do
not mention racial topics.
O’Ferrell said Wednesday that
FBI agents have not found a type
writer that reportedly links nis
typewritten court correspondence
with typed material sent by the ap
parent mail bomber. He said ear
lier he might have sold the
typewriter at his salvage store be
fore the bombings began.
The court documents obtained
from the 11th Circuit Wednesday
appear to have been written on at
least two different typewriters.
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