a vivid memory essay

Writing Prompt: What is your most vivid memory?

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Sarah under Bio , Blog post , memoir

Here’s a fairly simple Writing Exercise for memoir or autobiographical writing:

What is your most prominent or earliest memory after you describe this, laying out the settings and people, analyze why you think this memory sticks out to you..

For an example, this is one of my most vivid childhood memories involving a loving and protective family dog:

My first stepdad’s family had a dog named Candy. She was afraid of bonfires, but she showed courage protecting me from a tobacco worm the size of my tanned five-year-old forearm.

Swinging on a tree alone in my granny’s front yard, I saw bright-green balls stuck together, worming through the grass. Candy wouldn’t let me walk to it so I peered over her large back at the segments.

The crawler was enormous with two rows of big black cone spikes. The dog shifted and moved me. I was so small Candy corralled me and persistently pushed me away from the large Georgia tobacco worm. What a sweet dog, but that worm intrigued me. I bet it was out looking for food, just as hungry as I was always.

Pretty simple right? Get your creative juices flowing and put a few paragraphs down. I’d love if you shared them in the comments section. I promise this will be a judgement free post so share away!

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Mom used to take me to school. One time during summer, the cracked roads had smashed bee hives in our lane. We got out, Mom told me to get back in the car. She used a stick to poke the hive to the nearest ditch. We arrived just in time for school breakfast and I think she made it to work.

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How memories form and how we lose them

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Selected Essays/My Childhood Memories

Childhood memories are the sweetest things in a human mind. Nobody can forget one’s childhood memories whether pleasant or painful. When I think back about my childhood, many vivid memories spring to my mind. Some are pleasant while some are painful.

Regardless of the quality I attach to these memories, they constitute the early experiences of my life and they help to make me the person that I am today. “Sweet childish days, there were as long as twenty days are now” aptly said William Wordsworth.

The most vivid memory that I have is about the time I fell from a coconut tree. Though I fell from about three feet, I dislocated my elbow. I can still recall the process of falling and the immense pain and discomfort afterwards. I was about five at that time. The accident makes me extra careful whenever I climb a tree now. A repetition of a bad experience is definitely not welcomed.

As I grew older, I remember sitting sidesaddle on the horizontal bar of my elder brother’s bicycle while he pedaled us towards a small farm nearby. There we would feed ourselves on the way back. I had to watch out for the police because my brother told me that I if ere to caught riding sidesaddle, the police would arrest me and put me in jail. Now I know that he was just frightening me to be on the alert. He was too lazy to watch out for the police himself. Even this small fear had some kind of enjoyment.

My elder brother taught me many things. I learned to make flyable kites and spinning tops. In addition, we would go around fishing. Catching fish had its ups and downs. Ups when we managed to catch a small amount of fish, and downs when we ourselves became the victims of water leeches. Ugh! Just thinking of them now makes me feel creepy. We learned to respect the living creatures in the countryside.

No single living being rules nature. We are the hunters and the haunted at the same time. The most important thing is to recognise our position. Or to put it better in George Eliot’s words: “We could never have loved the Earth so well if we had no childhood in it.”

The pleasure of outdoor games in all kinds of weather, getting wet in the rain or soaking with sand, can never come back again. The golden days were tension free and care free from all sorts of duties and responsibilities. Even the fights had its own charms.

Each game played, each activity performed taught a unique lesson of life. Ironically as a child, I always wanted to grow up fast, now that I am growing and had grown up I want to be a child again and relive everything. Later on my elder brother went overseas for further studies. I miss him but fortunately I had a group of fiends living in the neighbourhood. We would play all sorts of games and go exploring all sorts of places. We were lucky to live at the fringe of town where the natural surroundings were not destroyed yet.

Now the streams and farm are gone, the victims of polluted drain was one a stream of cool clear water, brimming with life. No longer can we hear the call of the birds and animals. Instead, we hear impatient blast of car horns and the roar of bulldozers churning up the once beautiful land.

I mourn the destruction of the living bountiful land and the subsequent erection of nameless houses all arranged in neat sterile rows. I wonder what sort of childhood memories that children living in these houses will have. Especially in this technological world, the glory and enjoyment of outdoors games seems completely lost for these children.

As years rolled by, my friends and I grew up. Most of them have left the neighbourhood for more lucrative jobs I in the big cities. Some of us remained over here. We have lost our childhood. We are like stranger to one another now, for we have our separate lives to life. The only thing that binds us together is the fact that we share the same childhood memories, memories that we will always treasure.

• Book:Selected Essays

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• Review Article
• Published: 05 August 2019

The human imagination: the cognitive neuroscience of visual mental imagery

• Joel Pearson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3704-5037 1  

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume  20 ,  pages 624–634 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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• Object vision
• Sensory systems
• Working memory

Mental imagery can be advantageous, unnecessary and even clinically disruptive. With methodological constraints now overcome, research has shown that visual imagery involves a network of brain areas from the frontal cortex to sensory areas, overlapping with the default mode network, and can function much like a weak version of afferent perception. Imagery vividness and strength range from completely absent (aphantasia) to photo-like (hyperphantasia). Both the anatomy and function of the primary visual cortex are related to visual imagery. The use of imagery as a tool has been linked to many compound cognitive processes and imagery plays both symptomatic and mechanistic roles in neurological and mental disorders and treatments.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks R. Keogh, R. Koenig-Robert and A. Dawes for helpful feedback and discussion on this paper. This paper, and some of the work discussed in it, was supported by Australian National Health and Medical Research Council grants APP1024800, APP1046198 and APP1085404, a Career Development Fellowship APP1049596 and an Australian Research Council discovery project grant DP140101560.

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The reverse direction of neural information flow, for example, from the top-down, as opposed to the bottom-up.

Magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging decoding methods that are constrained by or based on individual voxel responses to perception, which are then used to decode imagery.

Transformations in a spatial domain.

The conscious sense or feeling of something, different from detection.

A mental disorder characterized by social anxiety, thought disorder, paranoid ideation, derealization and transient psychosis.

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A Neuroscientist’s Poignant Study of How We Forget Most Things in Life

By David Kortava

Any study of memory is, in the main, a study of its frailty. In “ Remember ,” an engrossing survey of the latest research, Lisa Genova explains that a healthy brain quickly forgets most of what passes into conscious awareness. The fragments of experience that do get encoded into long-term memory are then subject to “creative editing.” To remember an event is to reimagine it; in the reimagining, we inadvertently introduce new information, often colored by our current emotional state. A dream, a suggestion, and even the mere passage of time can warp a memory. It is sobering to realize that three out of four prisoners who are later exonerated through DNA evidence were initially convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony. “You can be 100 percent confident in your vivid memory,” Genova writes, “and still be 100 percent wrong.”

Forgetfulness is our “default setting,” and that’s a good thing. The sixty or so members of our species whose brains are not sieves have their own diagnosis: highly superior autobiographical memory, or hyperthymesia. While the average person can list no more than ten events for any given year of life, people living with H.S.A.M. “remember in excruciatingly vivid detail the very worst, most painful days of their lives.” The most studied case concerns Solomon Shereshevsky, an early-twentieth-century Russian journalist who, like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, “felt burdened by excessive and often irrelevant information and had enormous difficulty filtering, prioritizing, and forgetting what he didn’t want or need.” Desperate to empty his mind, Shereshevsky practiced, with some success, various visualization exercises: he’d imagine setting fire to his memories or picture them scrawled on a giant chalkboard and then erased. (He also turned to the comforts of the bottle and died of complications from alcoholism , although Genova doesn’t mention this.)

An efficient memory system, Genova writes, involves “a finely orchestrated balancing act between data storage and data disposal.” To retain an encounter, deliberate attention alone will get you most of the way there. “If you don’t have Alzheimer’s and you pay attention to what your partner is saying, you’re going to remember what they said.” (Distracted spouses, take note.) Also, get enough sleep. (An exhausted Yo-Yo Ma once left his eighteenth-century Venetian cello, worth $2.5 million, in the trunk of a New York City yellow cab.) Other strategies include leaning on external cues, such as checklists—every year, U.S. surgeons collectively leave hundreds of surgical instruments inside their patients’ bodies—chunking information into meaningful units, and the method of loci, or visualizing information in a familiar environment. Joshua Foer employed the latter device, also known as a “memory palace,” to win the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship.

The business of “motivated forgetting” is more complicated. Genova advises aspiring amnesiacs to avoid anything that might trigger an unwanted memory. “The more you’re able to leave it alone, the more it will weaken and be forgotten,” she writes. Easier said than done, especially with respect to the recurring, sticky memories that characterize conditions such as P.T.S.D. Here, Genova points to promising therapies that take advantage of the brain’s natural tendency to edit episodic memories with every retrieval. In the safe keeping of a psychiatrist’s office (and sometimes with the benefit of MDMA), a patient deliberately revisits the painful memory “with the intention of introducing changes,” revising and gradually overwriting the panic-inducing memory with a “gentler, emotionally neutral version of what happened.” Not quite “Eternal Sunshine,” but if it works, it works.

Genova, a neuroscientist by training, has spent most of her working life writing fiction about characters with various neurological maladies. Her novel “ Still Alice ,” from 2007, centered on a Harvard psychology professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. In “Remember,” her first nonfiction work, Genova assures her readers that only two per cent of Alzheimer’s cases are of the strictly inherited, early-onset kind. For most of us, our chances of developing the disease are highly amenable to interventions, as it takes fifteen to twenty years for the amyloid plaque that is mounting in our brains to reach a tipping point, “triggering a molecular cascade that causes tangles, neuroinflammation, cell death, and pathological forgetting.” What do those interventions look like? Genova’s guidance is backed by current science, but is mostly just parental: exercise, avoid chronic stress, adopt a Mediterranean diet, and enjoy your morning coffee—but not so much as to compromise deep sleep, which is when “your glial cells flush away any metabolic debris that has accumulated in your synapses.”

One of the more interesting studies that Genova cites followed six hundred and seventy-eight elderly nuns over two decades, subjecting them to all manner of physical and cognitive tests. When a nun died, her brain was collected for autopsy. Curiously, a number of the nuns whose brains showed plaques, tangles, and shrinkage exhibited “no behavioral signs” of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers theorized that these nuns had a high degree of “cognitive reserve”; they tended to have more years of formal education, active social lives, and mentally stimulating hobbies. Even as many old neural pathways collapsed, they were paving “new neural roads” and taking detours along as-yet undamaged connections, thereby masking, if not postponing, the onset of the disease. All pretty straightforward. Now all we have to do is build a society in which everyone has the time and resources for adequate sleep, exercise, nutrition, self-care, and a few good hobbies.

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By Andrea K. Scott

By André Alexis

Childhood Memories Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on childhood memories.

Memories are a vital component of our bodies. They shape our personality as all our knowledge and past experiences are stored there. All of us have memories, both good and bad. You have memories from long ago and also from recent times. Furthermore, some memories help us get by tough days and make us cheerful on good days.

Memories are the little things which help in running our lives smoothly. In other words, memories are irreplaceable and they are very dear to us. They help us learn from our mistakes and make us better. In my opinion, one’s childhood memories are the dearest to anyone. They help in keeping the child in you alive. Moreover, it also is a reason for our smiles in between adult life.

Importance of Childhood Memories

Childhood memories are very important in our lives. It makes us remember the best times of our lives. They shape our thinking and future. When one has good childhood memories, they grow up to be happy individuals. However, if one has traumatic childhood memories, it affects their adult life gravely.

Thus, we see how childhood memories shape our future. They do not necessarily define us but they surely play a great role. It is not important that someone with traumatic childhood memories may turn out to be not well. People get past their traumatic experiences and grow as human beings. But, these memories play a great role in this process as well.

Most importantly, childhood memories keep the inner child alive. No matter how old we get, there is always a child within each one of us. He/She comes out at different times.

For instance, some may act like a child on seeing swings; the other may get excited like a child when they see ice cream. All this happens so because we have our childhood memories reminding us of the times associated with the things we get excited about. Therefore, childhood memories play a great role in our lives.

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My Childhood Memories

Growing up, I had a very loving family. I had three siblings with whom I used to play a lot. I remember very fondly the games we use to play. Especially, in the evenings, we used to go out in the park with our sports equipment. Each day we played different games, for example, football on one day and cricket on the other. These memories of playing in the park are very dear to me.

Furthermore, I remember clearly the aroma of my grandmother’s pickles. I used to help her whenever she made pickles. We used to watch her do the magic of combining the oils and spices to make delicious pickles. Even today, I can sometimes smell her pickles whenever I look back at this memory.

Most importantly, I remember this instance very clearly when we went out for a picnic with my family. We paid a visit to the zoo and had an incredible day. My mother packed delectable dishes which we ate in the zoo. My father clicked so many pictures that day. When I look at these pictures, the memory is so clear, it seems like it happened just yesterday. Thus, my childhood memories are very dear to me and make me smile when I feel low.

Q.1 Why is Childhood Memories important?

A.1 Childhood memories shape our personality and future. They remind us of the good times and help us get by on tough days. Moreover, they remind us of past experiences and mistakes which help us improve ourselves.

Q.2 What can be a common childhood memory for all?

A.2 In my opinion, a childhood memory most of us have in common is the first day of school. Most of us remember what we felt like on the first day. In addition, our birthdays are also very common childhood memory that reminds us of gifts and celebrations on that day.

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Essay on My The Most Vivid Memory

Since I was old enough to remember, everything I’ve encountered or happen to see from a distance has been a life lesson. My hometown may be Palmdale but I used to live in Maywood and the neighborhood I lived in wasn’t safe and my siblings happened to get into bad crowds. I had no older sibling to look up to and as I got older I realized that I have to set a good example for my nieces and nephews because there’s no role model in my family that have graduated college or have made enough money to move into a good neighborhood. My childhood might have been different compared to most of the people I know but it’s motivated me to do better not just for me but for my entire family. 

One of the most vivid memories I have is moving to Palmdale and trying to pack my two friends in the back of the Uhaul truck. Although we got caught, it was one of the best memories I have from Maywood. By the time we had finished the house, my first niece was born and my sister had to take care of us because my parents worked all day and came home around seven or late than nine. Around this time my brother had gotten into trouble with the law, so he was sent to live with his biological father in Mexico. When he moved in with us, I had no idea who he was because I had little to no memories of him being in my life until I was around six or seven. Overall my family was already starting to do better once we moved. 

By the time I entered middle school I had lost all the best friends I had made in elementary so for a while, I didn’t talk to anyone until I met my best friend Valerie and Katelynn. They are the only ones who made my middle school experience good and we weren’t trying to grow up fast like the people around us. We made the best out of everything and tried to have fun and avoid problems in school and school dances. During middle school, I was going through phases trying to find what type of clothes I was comfortable wearing and made me feel confident but that was hard because my parents had gotten divorced and most of the time at home, I was sad and focused on my work to distract myself. Then everyone discovered what drugs and alcohol were and started peer pressuring one another. I was sad but I was smart enough to know that it wasn't the answer and I knew the consequences that came with it if I had tried it.

I think I'm in a good spot in life but soon things are going to start changing again. I am trying to grow up a little faster but not for the wrong reasons just to get a sense of what adulthood is going to be like. The older I get, the more my eyes start to open and time is just flying by so I try to make every situation better and enjoy every moment I have with everyone who is in my life. Soon I’ll be old enough to make my own decisions so, for now, I enjoy being a kid just with more responsibilities. Lastly, my friends and family are doing alright and there’s no conflict like there used to be and everything is falling right into place, slowly but surely. 

As a result, I've learned to be more independent and not fall for peer pressure. That although everything may seem hard and out of place, things are just slowly getting into place for the next situation. To sum it up, just have fun, surround yourself with people who care about your wellbeing and make wise choices.

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What Your Most Vivid Memories Say About You

How self-defining memories shape your identity..

Posted November 20, 2012 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

• Self-defining memories are the stories that we integrate into our sense of self. They are most easily remembered and emotionally intense.
• One study found that older adults tended to feel more positively about their self-defining memories, even if they were of negative events.
• Many studies suggest that suggest that it’s not the event, but the meaning you make out of the event, that affects your sense of well-being. 

In many ways, our memories define our sense of self. You are able to have a sense of identity because you know that you are the same person you were yesterday and will undoubtedly be the same person tomorrow. In its most basic form, your identity is the recognition that you are “Mary,” and not “Anne.”

You first become aware of your own identity early in life, perhaps as young as 18 months, when you recognize that the toddler you see in the mirror is really you, and not another child. As you progress through childhood and into adolescence , you start to develop a cohesive set of schemas, or views, about your identity. These include ideas about how your body looks and performs, your abilities and personality , your place in society, and the way you believe you are perceived by other people.

By the time we reach adolescence, we should have carved out at least a tentative sense of identity. Between adolescence and early adulthood, we refine this identity as we explore different options with regard to our roles and values. We also start to develop a vision of our future life, or what I call the “scenario.” As events unfold in our lives, we then start to create our own first-person accounts about the events we have encountered, or what I call the “life story.”

Recognizing our self-defining memories

Our identities become shaped by our life stories as we gradually incorporate the memories of the events in our lives into our sense of self (Whitbourne, 1985). The most important of these, the “self-defining memories,” are the ones that we remember most vividly and that contribute most heavily to our overall sense of self. A self-defining memory is also easily remembered, and emotionally intense. In some cases, these memories represent ongoing themes that we play out over and over again in our lives.

Learning to recognize your own self-defining memories can help you gain important insights into your identity. The easiest way to find out your own self-defining memories is by thinking about the events in your life that you are most likely to tell people about when they say “Tell me a little about yourself.” Chances are that you’ll start by saying something about your job status, interests, relationships, and favorite things to do. As the conversation unfolds, you’ll probably elaborate with a few anecdotes that illustrate these facts about yourself and your life.

The anecdotes that bubble up to the top of your memory are likely to contain at least some elements of your self-defining memories. It’s quite likely that you’ll try to avoid the TMI effect (“too much information”), especially when you’re meeting a stranger. However, the deeper memories that these anecdotes tap into are the ones that most likely will fit the criteria for being self-defining.

Measuring self-defining memories

The formal measure of self-defining memories, developed by Blagov and Singer (2004), involves two steps. First, participants list the 5-10 memories from their own experience that are the most important, most vivid, carry the most emotional meaning, are linked to other memories, and tend to be thought about the most often. Then they ask participants to rate these memories along a set of emotional dimensions. You can take a simplified version of this test by generating one or two (though you could do 5) memories of vivid and important events from your life. Then you can rate them according to these 3 criteria:

• Specificity: A highly specific memory refers to one event that had a relatively brief duration (such as a particularly enjoyable evening with friends). A nonspecific memory describes a lengthy episode (such as the prolonged illness of a relative). A generic memory refers to a set of similar events that happen repeatedly (such as yearly family picnics).
• Meaning : An integrative memory is one in which you make meaning out of an event (such as growing emotionally following the death of a relative). A nonintegrative memory is one that you haven’t particularly interpreted for yourself or seen yourself as growing from.
• Emotions : A positive memory is one that makes you feel happy, proud, and interested. A negative memory makes you feel sad, angry, fearful, shamed, disgusted, guilty, embarrassed, and contemptuous.

As you look at these memories, you probably notice that they fall into specific content areas. The typical areas that people mention include relationships, mortality (life-threatening events), leisure, and achievement or mastery. However, because self-defining memories are a fluid part of your identity, constantly changing as you experience more events, the content of your self-defining memories may vary according to your age and current life concerns.

Positive vs. negative self-defining memories

In an intriguing study, Connecticut College psychologist Jefferson Singer and his colleagues (2007) compared older adults with college students on self-defining memories. They found that older adults tended to come up with more general memories that linked several events together and that, in general, older adults tended to feel more positively about their self-defining memories, even if the memories were of events that were negative in nature. These findings fit with other lines of research suggesting that older adults have found ways to make sense out of their life stories. They convert memories of troubling events into stories of redemption in which they make peace with their past struggles. For younger adults, events of a negative nature had more rough edges, causing them to experience greater distress when they recalled them.

A self-defining memory does not have to be positive in order for you to grow from it. In fact, many studies that look at these so-called “narratives” that people construct out of their lives suggest that it’s not the event, but the meaning you make out of the event, that affects your sense of well-being. This means that the more you are able to talk about the meaning you derived from an event, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to grow and elaborate your sense of identity. On the other hand, the less specific your memories, the more likely it is that whatever is causing you to forget those details may also be inhibiting your growth. For example, none of us likes to think of events in which we acted in ways that now cause us to feel ashamed. Perhaps you had far too much to drink at a family event and made a fool out of yourself in front of your nearest and dearest. By trying to find the meaning in this event (you realized that you need to cut back on your alcohol use and did), you can integrate that event into your life story rather than pretending it didn’t happen at all.

In a future post, I plan to discuss the neurological underpinnings of these self-defining memories, and how your thoughts of the past shape your ability to think about the future. For now, however, figuring out your self-defining memories is an important step in coping with your life experiences. By recognizing and making sense out of past events, your identity can continue to grow and enhance your self-esteem and happiness , both now, and in the future.

Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. 2012

Blagov, P. S., & Singer, J. A. (2004). Four Dimensions of Self-Defining Memories (Specificity, Meaning, Content, and Affect) and Their Relationships to Self-Restraint, Distress, and Repressive Defensiveness. Journal of Personality , 72 (3), 481-511. doi:10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00270.x

Singer, J., Rexhaj, B., & Baddeley, J. (2007). Older, wiser, and happier? Comparing older adults' and college students' self-defining memories. Memory , 15 (8), 886-898. doi:10.1080/09658210701754351

Whitbourne, S. K.(1985).The psychological construction of the life span.In J. E. Birren & K. W. Schaie (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of aging , 2nd Ed.New York:VanNostrand Reinhold.

Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.

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I remember her saying "My name is Bird" I responded "Like the birds in the sky?" She would say "Yea" and smile. Even though I was a little girl and didn't know much, I knew she would be everything I would be looking for in a mother. Bird would come by three to four times a week to see my father and at the same time help me with my homework and do my hair. A year passed and finally the day I've been waiting so impatiently for has come. My father had proposed to Bird. I was so happy, but not just because I was going to finally have a mother, but because my father finally found somebody who is smart, caring, and dedicated to their self and his kids...

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Memories Fade: The Relationship Between Memory Vividness and Remembered Visual Salience

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Past events, particularly emotional experiences, are often vividly recollected. However, it remains unclear how qualitative information, such as low-level visual salience, is reconstructed and how the precision and bias of this information relate to subjective memory vividness. Here, we tested whether remembered visual salience contributes to vivid recollection. In three experiments, participants studied emotionally negative and neutral images that varied in luminance and color saturation, and they reconstructed the visual salience of each image in a subsequent test. Results revealed, unexpectedly, that memories were recollected as less visually salient than they were encoded, demonstrating a novel memory-fading effect, whereas negative emotion increased subjective memory vividness and the precision with which visual features were encoded. Finally, memory vividness tracked both the precision and remembered salience (bias) of visual information. These findings provide evidence that low-level visual information fades in memory and contributes to the experience of vivid recollection.

Episodic memories are marked by the recollection of a unique event, including specific perceptual details ( Tulving, 2002 ). Much research has characterized the processes supporting recall of high-level visual-event features, such as the location, people, and objects involved. Yet episodic memories vary not only in their content but also in their quality; some experiences continue to burn bright in memory, whereas others seem to fade. To what extent is forgetting associated with changes to the low-level visual quality of a memory, and how does this map on to our subjective experience of remembering?

Subjective judgments, such as vividness, have been frequently used as an overall measure of episodic memory, reflecting an ability to evaluate the richness of a particular composition of memory details ( Bonnici, Richter, Yazar, & Simons, 2016 ; Ford & Kensinger, 2016 ; Kuhl & Chun, 2014 ; St-Laurent, Abdi, & Buchsbaum, 2015 ). Yet the vast majority of studies have not assessed which specific characteristics underpin vivid recollection. Research has traditionally relied on discrete measures, such as the quantity of high-level event details (e.g., Horner & Burgess, 2014 ; Uncapher, Otten, & Rugg, 2006 ; see Fig. 1 ), to indicate the objective complexity of episodic memory. However, these measures have not captured the fine-grained variability of recollected information, which can be considered in terms of two components: precision , reflecting the fidelity of memory, and bias , representing the systematic deviation of memory content from its true value. Measuring the precision of episodic features, such as color or spatial location, has provided novel insights into the cognitive and neural processes involved in recollection ( Brady, Konkle, Gill, Oliva, & Alvarez, 2013 ; Harlow & Yonelinas, 2016 ; Nilakantan, Bridge, Gagnon, VanHaerents, & Voss, 2017 ; Richter, Cooper, Bays, & Simons, 2016 ). For instance, the precision of visual information contributes to perceived memory vividness over and above quantitative retrieval success ( Richter et al., 2016 ; Xie & Zhang, 2017 ). However, to our knowledge, no study has assessed biases in retrieval of continuous, low-level features, such as visual salience, nor how they relate to memory vividness.

The hypothesized relationships between subjective memory vividness and encoded high-level visual features (e.g., objects) and low-level visual features (e.g., visual salience), accounting for positive modulatory effects of emotional salience (orange stars). Tested relationships are shown with solid arrows, whereas relationships that are predicted but not tested here are shown with dashed arrows. We predicted that negative emotion would enhance the encoding and subsequent fidelity of both low-level and high-level visual representations, even as these features are forgotten (↓). We also predicted that emotional salience might transfer to represented visual salience (indicated by the orange arrow), creating a positive bias relative to neutral images, but we remained agnostic (?) about whether bias in represented visual salience would change with forgetting. We further predicted that subjective memory vividness would be positively influenced (+) by the bias or magnitude of represented visual salience, in addition to the fidelity of visual features.

An important factor in driving episodic memory quality is affective salience, namely, the intensity of an emotional experience. Negative emotional events are consistently more likely than neutral events to be subjectively recollected with enhanced vividness ( Dolcos, LaBar, & Cabeza, 2005 ; Ritchey, Dolcos, & Cabeza, 2008 ; Sharot, Delgado, & Phelps, 2004 ). However, greater emotional memory vividness is not driven by a general increase in the number of details remembered ( Kensinger, Addis, & Atapattu, 2011 ; Phelps & Sharot, 2008 ; Rimmele, Davachi, Petrov, Dougal, & Phelps, 2011 ) but, rather, by the magnitude of negative affective salience and greater recall of central visual information ( Kensinger, 2009 ; Mather & Sutherland, 2011 ; Yonelinas & Ritchey, 2015 ). Emotional visual details not only are more likely to be recalled but also are recalled more precisely ( Kensinger, Garoff-Eaton, & Schacter, 2007 ; Xie & Zhang, 2017 ). Such enhanced visual precision could explain why vivid and emotional memories are accompanied by greater neural recapitulation of visual details than less vivid ( Lee, Samide, Richter, & Kuhl, 2018 ), nonemotional ( Bowen, Kark, & Kensinger, 2017 ; Kark & Kensinger, 2015 ) events. It is also possible that subjectively vivid, emotional memories are remembered as more perceptually vibrant. That is, there may be a transfer of affective salience that creates a positive bias in visual salience, indexed by low-level visual features such as color or luminance (see Fig. 1 ). Could subjectively vivid recollection, enhanced by emotion, be characterized by a more visually salient memory representation?

Prior research has suggested that emotional salience can bias perception of low-level visual features. In one set of experiments, participants viewed emotional and neutral images, overlaid with varying noise, and were immediately asked to judge the magnitude of noise in relation to a scrambled image. Negative emotion enhanced the images’ signal-to-noise ratio, causing them to appear clearer than neutral images ( Todd, Schmitz, Susskind, & Anderson, 2013 ; Todd, Talmi, Schmitz, Susskind, & Anderson, 2012 ), which is in line with research showing that affective images are perceived as more visually complex ( Madan, Bayer, Gamer, Lonsdorf, & Sommer, 2018 ). Interestingly, the degree to which emotion influenced perception was predictive of subsequent subjective memory vividness ( Todd et al., 2013 ). However, it remains unclear how participants reconstruct low-level features in long-term memory and whether emotionally enhanced memory vividness is accompanied by a positive bias in recollected visual salience.

To this end, we developed a novel paradigm in which participants studied negative and neutral images presented in varying levels of visual salience, manipulated by changing luminance and color saturation. Participants reconstructed the images’ visual salience either immediately (perceptual task) or in a subsequent test (memory task), providing a measure of precision and bias. We first predicted that emotional images would be perceived and remembered as more visually salient than neutral images. We also expected that negative images would be reconstructed more precisely because of the benefits of emotion on encoding central visual features. Finally, we examined the relationship between remembered visual salience and subjective memory vividness, predicting that overall vividness not only would relate to the precision of recalled information but also would positively track bias in remembered visual salience.

Experiment 1

Participants.

Thirty-four participants took part in Experiment 1 (10 men, 24 women). The sample size was selected from a power analysis (G*Power; Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007 ), which indicated that this number of participants was sufficient to detect a medium within-subjects effect (Cohen’s d = 0.5) 80% of the time using an alpha (α) of .05. A Cohen’s d of 0.5 is similar to effect sizes reported in a recent study investigating the effect of emotion on memory for continuous visual features ( Xie & Zhang, 2017 ). All participants were between 18 and 35 years of age, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and had no current diagnoses or history of psychological or neurological disorders. One participant withdrew from the study (final N = 33 for all analyses; mean age = 19.46 years, SD = 1.25). Informed consent was obtained from all participants, who received course credit for their time. Procedures were approved by the Boston College Institutional Review Board.

A total of 288 images were selected from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka, Zurawski, Jednoróg, & Grabowska, 2014 ), 144 of which contained negative emotional content and 144 of which were neutral. Using the NAPS norms, we selected negative images to have an arousal rating greater than 5 (range = 1, low , to 9, high ) and a valence rating less than 4 (range = 1, low , to 9, high ). Neutral images had an arousal rating less than 5 and a valence rating between 4.5 and 6.5. Twelve versions of each image were created by linearly manipulating both the luminance and color saturation, key parameters influencing attention and perceived salience ( Engmann et al., 2009 ; White, Rojas, Mappes, Rautiala, & Kemp, 2017 ), in Commission Internationale de l’Éclairage (CIE) L * a * b * color space, where euclidean distance is approximately perceptually uniform. The lowest visually salient version of each image was allocated a luminance of 0.68 times the original image value and a color saturation of 0.05 times the original values. These values were increased in equal increments up to a maximum of 1.12 times the original luminance value and 1.7 times the original color saturation (see Fig. 2 ). Importantly, there were no significant differences in the luminance (mean pixel value of each gray-scale image) and color saturation (mean absolute values of a * and b *) of the original negative and neutral images ( p s > .607), which also did not differ on contrast or entropy ( p s > .279). Contrast is the standard deviation of pixel values within each gray-scale image, and entropy, H , is calculated from a histogram of the 8-bit gray-scale intensity values x, H = −Σ p ( x )log p ( x ), and represents the image randomness (for further details, see Marchewka et al., 2014 ). All images were scaled to 600 pixels × 450 pixels.

Example of an image at each of the 12 levels of visual salience. The luminance and color saturation of each image were increased or decreased in proportion to the original values. Excluding this example, all images used in the present experiments were taken from the Nencki Affective Picture System ( Marchewka, Zurawski, Jednoróg, & Grabowska, 2014 ).

Participants completed six study-test blocks, displayed using MATLAB (The MathWorks, Natick, MA) for the Psychophysics Toolbox ( Kleiner, Brainard, & Pelli, 2007 ). During each study phase, participants were presented with 24 negative images and 24 neutral images, displayed for 4 s each. Participants studied the visual details of each image for the duration of its presentation. For both negative and neutral conditions, 2 images from each of the 12 visual-salience levels were presented per study phase. For half of the trials, participants were tested immediately on the brightness of each image (perceptual task). For the other half of the trials, participants were tested on their memory for the brightness level in a subsequent memory test (memory task). An equal number of negative images and neutral images, at each level of salience, were studied for the memory and perception tasks. Presentation order was randomized for each participant.

Within a perception trial, participants studied an image and were then presented with a scrambled mask for 0.5 s, followed by the reappearance of the image at a pseudorandom level of visual salience. The same mask was used for every perception trial and was generated from a random combination of the experimental stimuli at random levels of visual salience. Participants were instructed to move up and down a brightness scale using the left and right arrow keys to change the brightness of the image back to the level in which it had just been presented and to press the space bar to confirm their response. Immediately after each study phase, participants completed a memory test in which they were presented with the 24 images (12 negative and 12 neutral) that they had previously studied but were not tested on immediately as part of the perceptual task. Participants were shown each image in a pseudorandom level of visual salience and were asked to reconstruct the original (studied) brightness of the image by moving up and down the scale between low and high. The average time between studying an image and seeing it again in the memory test was approximately 5 min. All responses were self-paced and equal numbers of each visual-salience level were used as the probe (test) images in the perceptual and memory tasks and for negative and neutral images. Therefore, the average distance between studied salience levels and test-probe salience levels was always zero for each condition, with a median absolute difference of 3.5. All trials were separated by a 1-s fixation cross.

For each trial, we first calculated salience error, which is the difference between the participant’s response and the target (studied) image salience level. Errors were analyzed separately by task (memory, perception) and emotion (negative, neutral), and two measures of interest were calculated to reflect distinct aspects of reconstructed visual salience: (a) salience bias and (b) salience precision. Salience bias is simply the average error across trials. No bias in responses along the visual-salience (brightness) scale would reflect an average error of zero, whereas a bias away from zero would reflect a shift in reconstructed salience, allowing us to test whether images were perceived or remembered as more or less visually salient than they actually were. Salience precision is the standard deviation of errors so that precision is equal to SD −1 . A smaller standard deviation would reflect a narrower error distribution and thus more precise visual-salience memory or perception, regardless of participants’ bias (see Fig. 1 ). All means are reported alongside a 95% confidence interval (CI), and all significant test statistics are accompanied by generalized eta-square (η G 2 ) or Cohen’s d effect sizes.

First, we tested whether negative images were associated with a positive bias (mean error) in reconstructed visual salience, which would mean that negative images were perceived or remembered as being more visually salient than their original level. Salience bias was not significantly influenced by emotion, F (1, 32) = 0.20, p = .661, but interestingly, bias in the memory task was significantly more negative than in the perceptual task, F (1, 32) = 4.45, p = .043, η G 2 = .03. This latter effect was not moderated by emotion, F (1, 32) = 0.44, p = .511. Specifically, we found, unexpectedly, that memory salience was significantly negatively biased, t (32) = −2.58, p = .015, d = 0.45, whereas perceptual-salience bias did not significantly differ from zero, t (32) = −1.23, p = .229. Therefore, although images were not perceived as any more or less visually salient than their true value, they were remembered as being less visually salient than they had been encoded, demonstrating memory fading (see Fig. 3b ). Importantly, the magnitude of salience bias was not driven by inherent variation in the original (unmanipulated) luminance and color saturation levels of the images (see Paragraph 1 in the Supplemental Material available online ).

Salience bias and precision in Experiment 1. Probability density plots (a) show the aggregate salience errors across participants within the memory and perception tasks, separately for negative- and neutral-emotion trials. The smoothed density curve is overlaid on each plot. The violin plots show (b) salience-bias estimates and (c) salience precision −1 estimates, separately for each task and trial type. Salience-bias estimates were calculated as the mean salience error shown in (a), and salience precision −1 estimates were calculated as the standard deviation of salience errors shown in (a). Colored circles show means for each participant, white circles represent the means for each combination of task and trial type, and error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.

Second, we analyzed how emotion might modulate the precision (standard deviation of errors) with which low-level visual salience is perceived and remembered. Not surprisingly, participants were more precise in the perceptual task compared with the memory task, F (1, 32) = 208.97, p < .001, η G 2 = .53. Moreover, the salience of negative emotional images was reconstructed more precisely than for neutral images (see Fig. 3c ), F (1, 32) = 5.75, p = .022, η G 2 = .01, and this emotion effect did not vary by task, F (1, 32) = 0.10, p = .753 (see Fig. 3c ). Therefore, negative emotion enhanced the precision with which continuous, low-level visual features were perceived and remembered. Moreover, salience bias and precision appear to be relatively independent measures, as indicated by a lack of correlation between these two variables in any condition—task (memory, perception) by emotion (negative, neutral)—across participants, | r s| < .07, p s > .713. Thus, variation in bias is unlikely to be explained simply by worse memory for the image features, as would be reflected in lower precision.

Experiment 2

Experiment 1 revealed that scenes are biased to be remembered as less visually salient than originally experienced and that emotion can increase the precision with which this information is represented. Experiment 2 built on this study by investigating the relationships among visual salience, emotion, and subjective memory vividness: Are vivid memories simply more precise than weaker memories, or are they also recalled as more vibrant by showing attenuated fading?

Thirty-four participants took part in Experiment 2 (9 men, 25 women; mean age = 19.35 years, SD = 1.77). Inclusion criteria were the same as for Experiment 1.

The task for Experiment 2 used the same procedures as Experiment 1 except for one change: In this task, participants studied 20 negative images and 20 neutral images per block, with the remaining 8 images (48 images total across the six study-test blocks; half negative and half neutral) presented in each block’s test phase as novel, unstudied images. For each memory test trial, participants were first shown a probe image at a pseudorandom level of visual salience and were asked to judge whether it was new (response = 1) or old (response = 2–7); the latter judgment was combined with an overall memory-vividness rating on a 6-point scale. Specifically, when an image was recognized, participants were asked to also make an overall judgment reflecting how vividly they remembered studying it originally, on the basis of how clearly they could remember “the image’s specific visual appearance.” For this question, participants were further prompted to “evaluate the quality of your memory for each image and use a range of vividness ratings throughout the experiment.” Responses were self-paced. For recognized images (regardless of whether they were actually old or new), participants were then asked to reconstruct the original brightness of the image as before.

Measures of visual-salience bias and precision were computed using the same method as before. However, for the memory condition, now only studied items that were successfully recognized could be analyzed. Additional analyses for Experiment 2 included recognition memory accuracy (hits – false alarms) and mean memory vividness for successfully recognized images, comparing negative items with neutral items. We then analyzed how trial-specific subjective-vividness ratings related to visual-salience memory bias and precision. First, separate within-subjects linear regression analyses were used to estimate (a) precision (absolute error; 0–11) and (b) bias (raw error, accounting for positive or negative shift; −11–11) at each level of vividness (2–7). Second, within-subjects multiple regression analysis was used to assess the unique influence of bias and precision on vividness ratings. One-sample t tests were used to test whether the average beta estimates differed from zero across subjects. Overall, participants responded with more high vividness ratings than low vividness ratings, and so we restricted this analysis to participants who showed sufficient variability in their vividness responses, removing participants whose variance of vividness ratings fell below 1 standard deviation from the group mean ( n = 7).

First, we compared negative trials and neutral trials in terms of recognition accuracy and overall memory vividness. As expected, negative emotional images ( M = .88, 95% CI = [.844, .908]) were more likely to be correctly recognized than neutral images ( M = .84, 95% CI = [.800, .878]), t (33) = 3.07, p = .004, d = 0.53, and memory vividness was also higher for successfully recognized negative images ( M = 5.50, 95% CI = [5.198, 5.802]) compared with neutral images ( M = 5.26, 95% CI = [4.944, 5.576]), t (33) = 3.83, p < .001, d = 0.66. Moreover, a continuous measure of emotional salience within negative items alone positively correlated with subsequent memory (see Paragraph 2 in the Supplemental Material ).

Analyzing visual-salience bias for all perceptual trials and for successfully recognized images, we again found that bias in the memory task was significantly more negative than in the perceptual task, F (1, 33) = 48.39, p < .001, η G 2 = .21, with no main effect of emotion, F (1, 33) = 3.31, p = .078. Replicating Experiment 1, results showed that remembered salience was significantly negatively biased, t (33) = −5.87, p < .001, d = 1.01 (see Fig. 4b ), yet perceptual-salience bias did not significantly differ from zero, t (33) = −0.68, p = .502. However, we now found that emotion modulated the memory-fading effect, F (1, 33) = 8.56, p = .006, η G 2 = .01, and recognized emotional images showed an attenuated-salience bias relative to neutral images, t (33) = 2.59, p = .014, d = 0.44. Of note, though, the magnitude of salience bias did not correlate with a continuous measure of emotional salience within negative images (see Paragraph 2 in the Supplemental Material ). Because of the restriction of analyses to successfully recognized trials, it is possible that apparent memory fading is influenced by an imbalance in the number of images recognized from each salience level, which would occur if the level of studied visual salience influenced the likelihood of subsequent recognition. Although we did observe a positive relationship between studied visual salience and subsequent memory (mean z = 0.08, 95% CI = [0.037, 0.130]), t (33) = 3.54, p = .001, d = 0.61, controlling for this relationship still revealed significant memory fading (see Paragraph 3 in the Supplemental Material ).

Salience bias and precision in Experiment 2. Probability density plots (a) show the aggregate salience errors across participants within the memory and perception tasks, separately for negative- and neutral-emotion trials. The smoothed density curve is overlaid on each plot. The violin plots show (b) salience-bias estimates and (c) salience precision −1 estimates, separately for each task and trial type. Salience-bias estimates were calculated as the mean salience error shown in (a), and salience precision −1 estimates were calculated as the standard deviation of salience errors shown in (a). Colored circles show means for each participant, white circles represent the means for each combination of task and trial type, and error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.

With regard to salience precision, participants were again more precise at reconstructing the target salience in the perceptual task compared with the memory task (see Fig. 4c ), F (1, 33) = 205.55, p < .001, η G 2 = .58, but this analysis revealed no significant effects of emotion on salience precision, F s(1, 33) < 1.35, p s > .255. Therefore, emotion did not enhance the precision with which successfully recognized images, specifically, could be reconstructed.

Next, we tested how memory vividness was related to visual-salience precision and bias. Trial-specific vividness ratings were strongly negatively related to absolute error of visual-salience memory (mean β = −0.262, 95% CI = [–0.323, –0.201]), t (26) = −8.39, p < .001, d = 1.61; higher vividness was associated with higher precision within subjects, and this relationship was significantly stronger for neutral images (mean β = −0.33, 95% CI = [–0.418, –0.250]) than for negative images (mean β 1 = −0.19, 95% CI = [–0.273, –0.107]), t (26) = 2.46, p = .021, d = 0.47. Additionally, vividness ratings were positively related to trial-to-trial memory bias (mean β = 0.251, 95% CI = [0.137, 0.365]), t (26) = 4.30, p < .001, d = 0.83; images remembered as less salient than they were encoded were associated with lower memory vividness, and the most vividly remembered images did not show signs of fading (see Fig. 5 ). This effect did not significantly differ between negative trials (mean β = 0.19, 95% CI = [0.038, 0.340]) and neutral trials (mean β = 0.31, 95% CI = [0.174, 0.454]), t (26) = 1.36, p = .185. The relationship between visual-salience bias and memory vividness remained, even when analyses controlled for variation in precision (mean β = 0.029, 95% CI = [0.007, 0.050]), t (26) = 2.60, p = .015, d = 0.50, with precision also uniquely contributing to vividness (mean β = −0.102, 95% CI = [–0.130, –0.074]), t (26) = −7.17, p < .001, d = 1.38. The reported results were limited to participants with sufficient variability in vividness responses (see the Method section), but results were similar when the full sample was included.

Relationship between trial-specific memory vividness and remembered visual salience in Experiment 2. Frequency histograms (a) show the number of responses per vividness rating across participants in this analysis, separately for negative- and neutral-emotion trials. Aggregate probability density plots (b) show salience error for all trials on which the image was judged as “old.” Results are shown for each level of memory vividness, ranging from 2 (lowest) to 7 (highest). Mean predicted salience bias (c) and mean predicted salience precision (absolute error; d) are shown for each level of memory vividness, separately for negative- and neutral-emotion trials. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Experiment 3

The results of Experiment 2 replicated those of Experiment 1 by showing that memories fade. Moreover, memory vividness was influenced both by the precision of remembered visual details and by the degree of bias. The effects of emotion, however, differed: Negative emotion enhanced precision and had no effect on bias in Experiment 1, but it had no effect on precision and attenuated memory fading in Experiment 2. To test whether these differences might be explained by including salience judgments for only remembered images (Experiment 2) or for all trials (Experiment 1), we ran a third preregistered experiment with one change: In this experiment, participants reconstructed the visual salience of every image, even those that they did not explicitly remember.

Thirty-four participants took part in Experiment 3 (7 men, 27 women). Two participants were excluded from analyses—1 because of chance-level memory performance and 1 as a result of not meeting inclusion criteria—leaving a final sample size of 32 (mean age = 18.94 years, SD = 0.88).

Visual-salience bias and precision were first analyzed across all studied items. Salience errors for the memory task were then further analyzed by looking only at successfully recognized images. If this comparison produced a pattern similar to that observed between Experiments 1 and 2, then the difference in previous results could be due to the trial types analyzed. In contrast, if the results did not differ between including and excluding forgotten images, then the difference between experiments would more likely be a result of additionally evaluating subjective memory vividness.

As before, negative emotional images ( M = .86, 95% CI = [.816, .899]) were more likely to be correctly recognized than neutral images ( M = .81, 95% CI = [.779, .846]), t (31) = 3.37, p = .002, d = 0.60, and subjective memory vividness was also higher for successfully recognized negative images ( M = 5.51, 95% CI = [5.146, 5.874]) compared with neutral images ( M = 5.34, 95% CI = [4.976, 5.704]), t (31) = 3.92, p < .001, d = 0.69.

We first replicated the memory-fading effect by finding that salience bias in the memory task was significantly more negative than in the perceptual task, F (1, 31) = 12.87, p = .001, η G 2 = .07, whereas effects of emotion did not reach significance, F s(1, 31) < 3.97, p s > .055. As in Experiment 1, remembered salience across all studied images was significantly negatively biased, t (31) = −3.33, p = .002, d = 0.59, whereas perceptual-salience bias did not differ from zero, t (31) = −0.56, p = .578. Analyzing salience bias for only successfully recognized images, as in Experiment 2, also revealed a significant negative salience bias, t (31) = −4.46, p < .001, d = 0.79. However, we no longer observed any attenuation of bias by negative emotion, t (31) = 0.47, p = .644. Thus, the effects of emotion on the magnitude of visual-salience bias were not consistent across the three experiments (see Figs. 6a and ​ and6b). 6b ). In contrast, we again observed that negative emotion enhanced the precision with which visual salience was perceived and remembered, across all studied images, F (1, 31) = 8.74, p = .006, η G 2 = .01, as seen in Experiment 1. However, as found in Experiment 2, this difference was not significant when only memory hits were analyzed, t (31) = 0.75, p = .461 (see Figs. 6a and ​ and6b), 6b ), which suggests that the effects of emotion on precision were evident only when remembered and forgotten trials were combined.

Salience bias and precision, as well as their relationships to memory vividness, in Experiment 3. The violin plots (a, b) show salience bias (upper panels) and precision −1 (lower panels), separately for each task and trial type, calculated (a) across all studied images and (b) within correctly recognized trials only. Colored circles show means for each participant, white circles represent the means for each combination of task and trial type, and error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. In (c), mean predicted salience bias (upper panel) and mean predicted salience precision (absolute error; lower panel) are shown for each level of memory vividness. Error bars show 95% confidence intervals.

Lastly, we analyzed the relationships between (a) subjective memory vividness and salience precision and (b) subjective memory vividness and salience bias for successfully recognized images. Because of low variability in vividness responses, data from 4 participants were excluded from this analysis. Trial-specific vividness ratings were strongly negatively related to absolute error (precision) of visual-salience memory (mean β = −0.334, 95% CI = [–0.410, –0.258]), t (27) = −8.64, p < .001, d = 1.63, but this was not modulated by emotion, t (27) = 0.49, p = .627. Additionally, vividness ratings were positively related to trial-to-trial memory bias (mean β = 0.210, 95% CI = [0.077, 0.343]), t (26) = 3.09, p = .005, d = 0.59 (see Fig. 6c ), which was also not influenced by emotion, t (27) = 0.29, p = .772. The relationship between visual-salience bias and memory vividness was marginally significant even when analyses controlled for variation in precision (mean β = 0.021, 95% CI = [–0.002, 0.044]), t (26) = 1.92, p = .066, d = 0.36, with precision uniquely contributing to vividness (mean β = −0.125, 95% CI = [–0.157, –0.093]), t (26) = −7.58, p < .001, d = 1.43. These results were similar to those reported for Experiment 2, except that here, we no longer observed an effect of emotion on the relationship between precision and vividness.

Episodic memories contain complex sensory features, which vary in how accurately they reflect the original event. Yet it remains unclear how well continuous visual features are remembered and to what extent these qualities underpin vivid recollection, which is enhanced for negative emotional experiences ( Bowen et al., 2017 ). In three experiments, we tested how low-level visual salience is reconstructed, relates to subjective memory vividness, and is modulated by emotion. Unexpectedly, we first found that images were consistently remembered as less visually salient than originally experienced. Second, we found that memory vividness tracked the precision and bias of remembered salience, such that the fidelity and vibrancy of visual features were enhanced during vivid recollection. Finally, negative emotional content increased the precision with which visual salience was encoded but did reliably influence memory fading.

The finding that memories literally fade has, to our knowledge, not been demonstrated previously. Bias in remembered visual salience was related to subjective memory vividness; specifically, less vivid memories were measurably more visually dull than highly vivid memories. Given that systematic fading was specific to memory and not perception, this change could occur during memory consolidation. Prior research has suggested that, after encoding, high-level memory details (e.g., the central semantic and emotional content) are prioritized, whereas peripheral low-level details (e.g., the specific sensory properties) are weakened ( Mitchell & Cusack, 2016 ; Sekeres et al., 2016 ). We showed that these changes may reflect a genuine transformation of visual details rather than simply a loss of information. An alternative explanation is that a weaker recollective experience might lead to the heuristic that an experience must not have been visually salient to start with (cf. Johnson, 1997 ). Although the relationship between vividness and remembered visual salience may be bidirectional, a simple heuristic explanation failed to account for the finding that negative images were consistently remembered with greater subjective vividness but were not necessarily remembered as visually brighter than neutral images.

The effect of negative emotion on remembered visual-salience bias was inconsistent, with no significant emotional modulation in Experiments 1 and 3 and an attenuation of bias in Experiment 2. These findings ran counter to our initial hypothesis, in which we expected that affective salience might transfer to remembered visual salience. Considering the minor differences across the experiments, we note that the lack of a consistent effect highlights the importance of replication. Given that between-subjects variability appeared to be lowest in Experiment 2, it is possible that noise in subjective estimates of bias may have contributed to the different results. Alternatively, modulatory effects of emotion on memory for low-level visual features may be susceptible to individual differences in emotional experience, which we did not measure in this study. We consistently observed no effect of emotion on bias in the perceptual task, counter to our prediction and in contrast to findings on the memory task. Our hypothesis was inspired in part by findings from the work by Todd and colleagues (2013) , who showed that emotional content enhanced the perceptual salience of images. However, there are substantial differences among our paradigms: In the studies by Todd et al. (2012 , 2013 ), images were overlaid with noise and participants judged the relative signal-to-noise ratio. This judgment was likely influenced by the clarity with which the images appeared because visual perception is known to be enhanced by emotional arousal ( Mather & Sutherland, 2011 ). In contrast, we directly changed image characteristics, such that any shift in visual-salience bias would involve participants perceiving the images as looking qualitatively different. We found that negative emotion enhanced the precision with which low-level visual information was perceived. Thus, emotion likely enhances the fidelity of visual details but does not appear to bias the salience with which this information is represented.

Emotional images were more likely to be recognized with higher subjective vividness than neutral images, as expected, and visual details of negative memories could also be recalled more precisely. Moreover, memory precision was strongly related to judgments of memory vividness, as predicted. These results support previous findings that negative emotion can enhance both the subjective vividness and precision with which continuous visual features, such as color, are remembered ( Xie & Zhang, 2017 , 2018 ). However, the benefit of emotion on precision was observed only when all studied trials were analyzed (thus mixing different proportions of recognized and forgotten images for negative and neutral conditions) and not when analyses were restricted to successfully recognized images. Therefore, emotion may enhance the precision with which visual details are encoded, acting to increase subsequent recognition without necessarily increasing the fidelity of remembered events. Hence, emotional-memory vividness is likely to be independently influenced by affective salience ( Todd et al., 2012 ), rather than being predominantly explained by modulation of low-level visual information.

The current results open several questions for future research, most significantly the need to unpack the mechanisms by which visual memory details are transformed. First, orthogonalizing components of visual salience, such as color and luminance, may elucidate which properties most contribute to memory fading. Relatedly, it is important to investigate the relative contribution of low-level visual information to subjective vividness judgments when multiple aspects of events are tested. Finally, an important research avenue is to test how memory for different visual properties changes over time. Given that the benefits of emotion on recollection are amplified during memory consolidation ( Yonelinas & Ritchey, 2015 ), emotion effects may emerge with an increasing delay between encoding and retrieval. Overall, the discovery that visual characteristics of past events literally fade provides important insight into how memories are reconstructed: Memory representations do not simply lose high-level event details, but their low-level visual content can also become qualitatively transformed.

Supplementary Material

Acknowledgments.

We thank Max Bluestone, Helen Schmidt, Samantha Murphy, Mary Nanna, Julia Napoli, and Maria Khoudary for assistance with data collection.

Action Editor: Caren Rotello served as action editor for this article.

Author Contributions: R. A. Cooper and M. Ritchey developed the study concept. R. A. Cooper analyzed the data under the supervision of M. Ritchey. All the authors contributed to the study design and data interpretation. R. A. Cooper drafted the manuscript, and E. A. Kensinger and M. Ritchey provided critical revisions. All the authors approved the final manuscript for submission.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Funding: This research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health Grant No. R00MH103401 (to M. Ritchey).

Supplemental Material: Additional supporting information can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797619836093

All data have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/cuz8g/ . The materials used in these studies are freely available. Experiment 3 was preregistered and can be accessed at https://osf.io/nsj65/ . The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797619836093 . This article has received the badges for Open Data and Preregistration. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/badges .

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Childhood Memories Essay

As we grow up and look back on our childhood days, some memories come back to our minds. Although we were so young, these memories are so powerful and vivid that we relive them from time to time. Whatever childhood memory is, it is these memories that guide us and help us enjoy our lives.

Since childhood is the most significant part of our lives, here is a short essay on childhood memories to help you understand their importance. Through this childhood memories essay introduction, we hope to encourage you to write down your unique memories.

Experience of Childhood Memories

My most precious childhood memory is that of my parents preparing delightful snacks at home when I returned from school. Even though school is a great place to learn and play, sometimes I had bad days at school when I got into a disagreement with my friends. But good days also followed when I won art competitions and helped my classmates with their homework. Regardless of my good and bad days at school, the one thing that remained unchanged was my parents waiting patiently for me with a bowl of delicious snacks or cakes.

Then there were those moments I spent with my friends playing cricket or football in the playground. Those are among my most cherished moments because those times were really fun and enjoyable. I made so many friends and learned many lessons about patience and discipline by playing the games.

When I returned home after school, the smell of freshly baked cookies and fried snacks always enlivened me. I would look forward to eating all these delicious treats even as I would hear the last bell in the school. As soon as I reached home, I would race towards the kitchen where snacks were being prepared. But before I could see what was being made, they would make me play a small round of the ‘Guess the Snack’ game. I would have to guess what was made by the smell. I loved this little game, and I believe this is why I have a special interest in cooking and baking.

During the times I was not studying or playing, I would be in the kitchen, either helping my mother prepare food or experimenting with new recipes myself. I remember making a lemonade where I had to squeeze the juice of 3 lemons to finally make a glass. Even though my mother scolded me for creating a mess in the kitchen, this act of making something myself deeply satisfied me and made me happy. This is my fondest childhood memory, where I learned to make lemon juice, and it still brings me joy when I think about it.

Moral of the Essay

Writing a childhood memories essay in English would enable you to recall the best moments of your childhood once again. You will not know how much a particular memory remains so close to your heart until you start thinking or speaking about it. And by recollecting those memories, you will see yourself smiling and getting nostalgic about your childhood memory. Surely, it will help you forget your worries. So, try writing a short essay on childhood memories.

For an exciting range of kid-friendly learning resources, including essays, worksheets, puzzles, poems, etc., visit BYJU’s website.

Frequently Asked Questions on Childhood Memories Essay

How do you know which childhood memory is your favourite.

Whatever memory makes you the happiest and the one you wish to relive must be your favourite childhood memory.

What are the common childhood memories one has?

Usually, people remember things which they have done for the first time. For example, the first day at school, the first journey on a train/plane or the first swimming lesson.

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Vivid memories from hell: A systematic analysis of distressing near-death experiences accounts

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Memories of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) seem to be very detailed and stable over time. At present, there is still no satisfactory explanation for the NDEs&#39; rich phenomenology. Here we compared phenomenological characteristics of NDE memories with the reported experience&#39;s intensity. We included 152 individuals with a self-reported &quot;classical&quot; NDE (i.e. occurring in life-threatening conditions). All participants completed a mailed questionnaire that included a measure of phenomenological characteristics of memories (the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire; MCQ) and a measure of NDE&#39;s intensity (the Greyson NDE scale). Greyson NDE scale total score was positively correlated with MCQ total score, suggesting that participants who described more intense NDEs also reported more phenomenological memory characteristics of NDE. Using MCQ items, our study also showed that NDE&#39;s intensity is associated in particular with sensory details, personal importance and rea...

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Some people report memories of near-death experiences (NDEs) after facing situations of impending death and these memories appear to have significant consequences on their lives (here referred to as “real NDE experiencers”; real NDErs). We assessed to what extent NDE memories are considered self-defining: memories that help people to define clearly how they see themselves. We screened 71 participants using the Greyson NDE scale (48 real NDErs and 23 NDErs-like who had lived a similar experience in absence of a threat to their life). Participants described their two main self-defining memories (SDMs). For each SDM, they completed the Centrality of Event Scale (CES) to assess how central the event is to their identity. The two subgroups did not differ regarding the proportion of NDErs who recalled their NDE (30 real NDErs out of 48 and 11 NDErs-like out of 23). Real NDErs and NDErs-like who recalled their NDE (n¼41) reported richer experiences as assessed by the Greyson NDE scale. Furthermore, these participants rated their NDE memory as more central to their identity as compared to other SDMs, and the richness of the NDE memory was positively associated to its centrality (CES scores). Overall, these findings suggest that the self-defining aspect of the experience might be related to its phenomenological content rather than its circumstances of occurrence. The self-defining status of NDE memories confirms that they constitute an important part of NDErs’ personal identity and highlights the importance for clinicians to facilitate their integration within the self.

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A vivid memory essay

• Category: Essay
• Words: 1144
• Published: 12.11.19

This is just what I appreciated: Lights. Blurred vision. Center stage. Hundreds of persons in the target audience with all eye on myself. The recently waxed dark stage floor, and the digital cameras suspended in the ceiling predicting your every move to the tv, held by the judged desk. I was seven years old occurring ten. In those days I had been acquiring hip-hop, Tahitian, and Jazz music dance classes for eight years already, completed in all three repeatedly but hardly ever won initial in Jazz music. But That i knew of this was my own year. I had been more established than ever.

Spot light competition was the big competition at the end from the year, everyone from my dance school WSPA and over came to compete, including my friend Leighlani. Leighlani was just like my best friend inside the dance universe, she was two years elderly but age group was never a factor in our friendship. Leighlani was a Tahitian dancer. And although she only danced Tahitian she would always assist and perfect my own dancing. One other perfectionist was my Punk teacher Kelly. She was more than austere, she picked at every single smidge of any wrong approach.

If it wasn’t up to her standard you weren’t receiving pass with her. At that time I disliked her tight teaching although looking backside I guess it absolutely was for the best. Because was my last year with Kelly because my Jazz music teacher I felt like I had fashioned to keep working at it through anything holding myself back and take that succeed home. I was all backstage. Myself, Leighlani, Kelly, and my hip-hop teachers Meat and Chris. Chris and Kelly had been trying to get my own music build while Leighlani and Terry ran through my dances hundreds of moments. Pat and Leighlani had been downright and utterly discouraged with me.

I actually couldn’t emphasis at all. My personal environment was throwing me off a little. I was accustomed to being surrounded with other peaceful Jazz ballet dancers who were keeping to themselves like I would become. But throughout were Tahitian and hula dancing dancers, big feather headpieces, flowers becoming thrown all-around, and the audio of solid wood jewelry beating together. The hula category was immediately after me thus they were almost all getting ready. When it arrived at dance, Leighlani became a miniature Kelly and had not been about to play games. Whenever the girl saw myself get upset or diverted she made it her duty so get me back in the game.

Ahead of I knew this, it was my own 10 small call. I desired to take now to really relax and try to focus on myself, however something has to go wrong. I overhear Kelly, Pat, and Chris talking about my music. Kelly’s confront was reddish colored but not of anger, really remorse. At this time Im considering something is incredibly wrong with my music and there is no extra duplicate to use. I immediately anxiety. I envisioned myself of stage and my music skipping or stopping totally, and me just standing there which has a blank phrase on my encounter, then losing once again.

Nevertheless here comes Leighlani to the rescue making an effort to relaxed me straight down. She comes over and demands me “Liyah, why do you look like the about to barf? Ha-ha.  “Something is usually wrong with my music and have zero clue what’s happening.  We tell her. “Calm down alright? You got it dude.  “You started using it dude was Lani’s preferred thing to say. Despite the fact that she said it all time I knew the girl actually designed it. A couple minutes after Kelly comes relieved using a cd held in her palm. By this time my personal ten moments are just regarding over and really time for me personally to do my personal thang and leave it all on the level.

My brand a mispronunciation like always, my number 1011, as well as the name of my boogie “Did En este momento Hear?  was known as. I walk on stage starring into the shiny flash of sunshine in the bar back blinding the vision me to get a second. My hands will be shaking, my personal upper lip is usually shiny in the sweat appearing and my own chest was pounding such as a hammer on the nail. Now I could not remember the first thing on the boogie nor just how it ended. Up until the background music cut about. When I noticed the music my body moved for me. I was moving. Every push stuck expending every movement hit sharp.

My last pose probably should not have included a smile although I could hardly help it, it felt so great to know you did the best you could have. An hour later was awards. Even though I was and so confident in myself, this part constantly made me stressed. Sitting there on stage listening to every single ones name get called, waiting for yours to come out the announcers mouth. Leighlani snuck on stage to sit beside me as I anxiously waited. Our hands locked, squeezing so limited the green blood vessels were emerging of both of our hands. The announcer is offering the “everyone is a champion speech no-one especially Leighlani, didn’t want to hear.

Lani, more stressed than me was receiving irritated and was making smart remarks after every thing the announcer said. Lani’s comments make me chuckle which is comforting me straight down. I relieve Leighlani’s hands a bit letting air flow through our interweaving fingers. We close my eyes and try to inwardly smile at everything about me and imagine the announcer calling my name. I find myself an intense nudge and open my eyes and realize my own name was just known as. The wrinkles on my 4 head appeared because the seem of confusion upon my personal face. I was so zoned out I had fashioned no hint what place I received.

I look over at Lani and her eyes had been watering like she was about to cry and a proud grin was onto her face. It had been then I recognized. I did this. I received. Looking backside on that day is encouraging to my opinion, it revealed me basically really put my thoughts to some thing I could attain my desired goals. Unfortunately that was my last year moving Jazz by WSPA, but since I could I would relive all this over again. Nevertheless for now I could make time. Time for Lani’s help, time for that nervous feeling, and time for that nine year old girl staying pronounced overall winner in the 8-10 alone division Jazz music step party.

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Guest Essay

Why We Must Keep the Memory of D-Day Alive

By Garrett M. Graff

Mr. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author, most recently, of “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.”

Day by passing day, the Greatest Generation is coming toward its end. D-Day, June 6, 1944, had more than two million Allied personnel on the move across Operation Overlord, and today perhaps a few thousand veterans remain.

In 2021, Harry Parham, believed to be the last Black combat veteran of D-Day — about 2,000 Black troops landed that day — died at 99. Last July, Leon Gautier, the last surviving French commando at the Normandy landings, died. In December, it was Maureen Sweeney, the Irish weather observer whose reports of storms over the Atlantic changed the course of D-Day. In April, it was Bill Gladden, who had been part of the British Sixth Airborne Division’s glider landing on that day and had hoped, at age 100, to survive to return to Normandy, France, for Thursday’s 80th anniversary.

As we mark the final passing of those who won that war, it’s easy to get caught up in gauzy romanticism and lose sight of how the Axis powers unified the free world against them and showed Americans, specifically, what we are capable of.

Every serviceman headed to Normandy was handed a “Pocket Guide to France” that read, in part: “We democracies aren’t just doing favors in fighting for each other when history gets tough. We’re all in the same boat. Take a look around you as you move into France and you’ll see what the Nazis do to a democracy.”

This election year it is worth asking what we are doing with the legacy that the Greatest Generation defended and bequeathed to us. American freedom has always been imperfect — a nation seeking, generation after generation, to be better, more equal, more inclusive and still more free. It is a story of hard-fought rights and bloodily defended liberties that each generation of Americans has handed down to the next, a vision for a future in which each successive generation will improve upon the past.

We now face the very real question of whether America will embrace a vision of a country less free and less democratic, more divided and more unequal. It would be a step backward unlike almost anything else in American history.

We can hold on to the past to be reminded of what America, and its allies, were once able to achieve. D-Day was a titanic enterprise, perhaps the largest and most complex single operation in human history — an effort to launch a force of more than a million men across the English Channel on more than 3,000 planes and more than 7,000 ships; to methodically transport entire floating harbors, a herculean secret project known as the Mulberries, as well as 300,500 gallons of drinking water and 800,000 pints of blood plasma, a stockpile carefully segregated, as mandated at the time, between white and Black donors.

The day, fought across five beaches and a roughly 60-mile-wide front, is too vast to comprehend and, in that sense, is best understood at the level of the individual. Take the story of Albert Mominee serving with the 16th Infantry Regiment. He was a slight 28-year-old from Southbridge, Mass., who had cleared the Army’s five-foot height minimum by a mere inch. Two years into his military service, D-Day would already be his third foreign invasion.

He was among the older of the troops at the time; many of the “veteran” sergeants on D-Day were just in their early 20s, while the paratroopers and soldiers they commanded were often still in their teens. The coxswain of LCT-589, Edward Bacalia, known as “Bugs,” was 17 years old. “We owed our skins to Bugs’s seamanship, too, that day,” recalled his crew mate Martin Waarvick. “How about that: 17 years old and piloting a landing craft onto Omaha Beach on D-Day? Not just once, but twice.”

Pvt. Frank Palys, of the 101st Airborne’s 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment — the regiment whose Easy Company was later immortalized in the mini-series “Band of Brothers” — recalled, “I was just a young kid, like the rest of them, trying to free the world from the Nazis.” Or, as Pvt. Ernest Hilberg, of the 18th Infantry Regiment, put it: “I was doing a job that had to be done, that we were going to get rid of the bastard Hitler.”

What that Greatest Generation fought for on D-Day was noble — the first successful cross-Channel invasion from Britain in history, launched not to subjugate or seize but to liberate a continent darkened by authoritarianism. As the supreme allied commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, told CBS’s Walter Cronkite, when they returned to Normandy in 1964 for the 20th anniversary, “These men came here — British, and our other allies, Americans — to storm these beaches for one purpose only, not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom.”

It took another 20 years for the heroism of what would come to be called the Greatest Generation to be appropriately lionized. For decades, few had spoken openly or boastfully of the fights of World War II. Veterans, ripped early from their already hard peacetime childhoods during the Great Depression, had been deposited back in the country after 1945 flush with hard-earned experience, youthful energy and G.I. Bill cash. They settled into aggressively pursuing their daily lives and an American economic boom that created, as politicians often celebrated, the strongest middle class in world history.

In their adulthoods, they held the line against the Communists and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, again defending freedom from authoritarianism. First Sgt. Leonard G. Lomell, of the Second Ranger Battalion, who had climbed the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in Normandy to disable a threatening German battery, captured the sentiment of many: “I’ve kept a low profile for 50 years, as have most of my men. We didn’t write articles, books, make speeches or publicize the performance of our duties. We knew what each other did and we did our duty like professionals. We weren’t heroes; we were just good Rangers.”

It was President Ronald Reagan’s speech at Pointe du Hoc in 1984, celebrating the exploits of Lomell and his comrades, that began to properly honor and memorialize the fight of World War II. Follow-on work by writers like Stephen Ambrose, Douglas Brinkley and Tom Brokaw changed forever how history will view the sacrifices of both the living and the dead of World War II.

Mr. Brokaw found himself transformed by his journey at the 40th anniversary through the cafes and villages of Normandy, speaking to veterans who had returned to view the beaches they had fought so hard to capture. “I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. I realized that they had been all around me as I was growing up and that I had failed to appreciate what they had been through and what they had accomplished,” Mr. Brokaw wrote in the introduction of his 1998 book, “The Greatest Generation.”

Now it feels almost trite to label World War II the “Good War,” but, in so many ways, for America it was — arguably the last war America fought that ended with a clear victory, waged against an enemy that united America more than it divided us, the last war that clearly pitted good against evil in the pursuit of the ideals of freedom and democracy, which in today’s America feels ever more elusive, unfortunately controversial, and too often negotiable or situational.

America’s role in World War II was far from perfect — recent years have seen an overdue reckoning with the internment of Japanese Americans, to name just one dark chapter. But it was a war we understood and one that gave meaning to those who fought in it. It was a war for an ideal, where our leaders and politicians asked clearly and confidently for sacrifice for noble reasons.

Across the next few months we will be hearing a lot of argument about what America is and what it isn’t. There’s a simpler answer to that question than many would like to admit: What we’ll fight for is who we are. And, as we look ahead, we must decide if we’re still as willing today to fight for democracy as the generation who stormed Normandy was 80 years ago.

Mr. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author, most recently, of “ When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Journal of Materials Chemistry A

High-strength thermochromic and mechanochromic liquid-crystal elastomers with responsive shape memory and dynamic adhesion.

Soft materials with stimuli-responsive functionalities have crucial applications in advanced sensors and soft robotics. However, integrating multiple response functions into a single soft material poses significant challenges. In addition, striking a good tradeoff between achieving high mechanical performance and maintaining a highly sensitive response to external stimuli is crucial. Here, we present the design of cholesteric liquid crystal elastomers (CLCEs) characterized by high mechanical performance and a diverse array of responsive functionalities including thermochromic, mechanochromic, shape memory, and dynamic adhesion behaviors. The strategy employed involves the creation of loosely cross-linked CLCEs with densely packed nematic and chiral LC mesogens suspended on the side chain, ensuring significant tunability in the ordering/orientation, coupled with notable energy dissipation across the nematic-isotropic transition. We systematically investigated the impact of the crosslinking density and chiral content on the thermal, photonic, and mechanical behaviors. The CLCE films exhibit superior mechanical properties (b 19.7 MPa and b 300%), sensitive thermochromic and mechanochromic behaviors in the full visible light wavelength range, characteristic triple shape memory effects, and universal temperature-responsive adhesion. This study represents an effort toward developing mechanically robust CLCEs that integrate multiple stimuli-responsive functionalities, providing the foundation for advanced applications in anti-counterfeiting, optical sensors, and biomorphic robotics.

• This article is part of the themed collection: Journal of Materials Chemistry A HOT Papers

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L. Li, X. Yin, Y. Zhao, L. Shi, K. Yang and Y. Wang, J. Mater. Chem. A , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4TA02010C

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D-Day memories are still vivid for this 99-year-old RI vet. Mark Patinkin shares his story

You would think that after 80 years, the emotions of surviving D-Day would fade, but as Richard Fazzio , now 99, speaks of it, he has to pause, his hands over his face.

Fazzio still lives independently in a small apartment in the home of a granddaughter in Woonsocket, the town where he grew up.

If you’ve seen “Saving Private Ryan,” that’s what Fazzio went through. He was in the first wave that landed on Omaha Beach, driving a Higgins boat that dropped off more than 30 soldiers.

Many were killed as soon as the ramp dropped, Fazzio almost among them, a bullet striking his upper right side below his arm and exiting his back.

He tells me he is unable to sleep when thoughts of the day come back to him.

Yet most of the time, Fazzio is an upbeat guy, and he offers a firm handshake as I greet him.

He sits back down in a La-Z-Boy, a cane next to him – that’s all he needs to get around, and often not even that. He’s wearing a dark hat that says “WWII Veteran.”

Of the 150,000 who landed on D-Day, only a few thousand are left. Fazzio is among the final handful in Rhode Island.

Just about everyone he knew in the Navy is gone now, including his crew of four who piloted the boat through German shellfire. One of them was from Cumberland, Wally Lawton .

“We used to visit each other, the four of us,” Fazzio said.

But the old Woonsocket sailor is now the last one. At age 99, he’s got a son, Frank, 70, and daughter, Frances, 74. Both were named after Fazzio’s older brother Frank who sadly was killed in the war. Frank was a soldier in the Pacific, pinned down in the Philippines, intentionally drawing fire his way to help his buddies fight back, and he paid the price.

“She was never the same after that,” Fazzio said of his mom. “I would have stayed in the Navy if it wasn’t for that. But I thought I’d better get out.” For her.

Fazzio is a classic Rhode Island story, son of Italian immigrants, raised in working-class Woonsocket, his father, Charles, a handyman and construction guy.

Fazzio wanted to get into similar work, so he quit school at 16.

“I had one subject I liked, recess,” he jokes.

But he was serious enough to want to enlist in the Navy in 1943, when he was 17.

“I remember my father, he wouldn’t sign for me,” Fazzio recalls. “But I kept begging him, and finally he came around. He was crying when he signed.”

I asked if he still remembers D-Day clearly.

“How can I forget?”

His job was to ferry infantry the final miles to the beach from a big transport ship. It was pitch dark when the battleships around him there in the English Channel opened fire on the German defenders ashore.

“It was like the Fourth of July,” said Fazzio “The sky lit up.”

Then the American planes began bombing.

Patinkin: Colleen Mellor and Paul Gates were together for 33 years. Why now they'll never be alone

“I said to my crew, ‘This is going to be a breeze.’ Boy, were we wrong.”

Because of cloud cover, the bombing mostly missed.

Each boat was given different parts of the beach to aim for. Fazzio was to steer toward the white steeple of a church just behind it. Today, that’s where the American cemetery is. It includes 99 graves of the fallen from Rhode Island.

More: D-Day: Under fire at Omaha Beach experienced in virtual reality. Documentarian's passion project

It took about 25 minutes to get in. A few hundred feet offshore, they were hit by a full barrage of German gunfire. Fazzio saw other Higgins boats drop their ramps early while others hit obstacles the Germans had set up. Fazzio watched as the men inside were swamped, trying to swim to shore while being shot at.

He kept going, yelling at the men in his boat not to look above the sides or they could catch a bullet.  

Fazzio found himself thinking of his four sisters, three brothers and parents.

“I’m praying, don’t let my mother get one of those telegrams,” he told me.

But she ended up getting two – one for Fazzio’s fallen brother, a second for what was about to happen to Fazzio himself.

Finally, at 6:30 a.m., Fazzio’s was among the very first American boats driving onto French sand. He was 18.

He dropped the ramp.

“I don’t know how many made it,” he told me. He saw some fall as enemy bullets pinged everywhere. But they were Army and Fazzio was Navy so he didn’t know them to follow up.

He wasn’t able to back off the beach instantly because one soldier was frozen aboard. Fazzio didn’t blame him.

“He’s seen bodies and guys getting killed, for crying out loud.”

But Fazzio’s orders were to only bring back the wounded or the dead.

He raised his arm to wave the man off.

“I felt a sting through my body,” he recalled, “a burning sensation.” He wasn’t sure what had happened, but finally, he saw the soldier run ashore.

“I gave one more look at the beach, put my boat in reverse and I start to come back.”

As they plowed back toward the convoy miles back to ferry a second load of soldiers ashore, Wally Lawton of Cumberland saw something wrong with Fazzio.

“What happened,” Lawton asked.

“I think I got shot. I’m not sure.”

They took off his life jacket, laid him down in the boat, and soon, back on the troop carrier ship, the medical team was treating him.

“I thank God almighty I came out alive,” Fazzio told me. “A lot didn’t. They were getting picked off like ducks in the water, for crying out loud.”

At that, he stops the story and puts both hands over his face, saying he can still picture it today.

“Seeing soldiers killed like that, it stays in your mind forever,” said Fazzio. “And I felt sorry for their mothers.”

Here in his Woonsocket apartment, I asked if he’d been back to Normandy.

Just once, 18 years ago. He was brought there with 14 other local D-Day veterans by Tim Gray, Rhode Island’s notable World War II documentary maker . That was Gray’s first film. He has now done 38.

Gray had helped set up my interview with Fazzio, and he joined us for it.

I asked Gray how he sees D-Day at this point.

“The United States became a superpower on June 6, 1944,” he told me. “It was one of the most monumental days in American history.”

It is poignant that so few who were part of it are left.

But Richard Fazzio of Woonsocket, age 99 and still remarkably clear of mind, is among them.

He’s more than a witness; he lived it.

It was an honor to hear his testimony.

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New York museum ‘keeps memories alive’ 35 years after Tiananmen crackdown

A bloodied blouse, a tent and a military medal are among the exhibits commemorating China’s brutal suppression of student protests in 1989.

New York City – When Zhou Fengsuo last saw the mimeograph machine, he was running for his life as the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989.

For weeks before that night of bloodshed, Zhou had used the machine, a state-of-the-art photocopier at the time, to churn out leaflets to spread the message of China’s pro-democracy movement.

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As one of the last student leaders to leave the square, Zhou tried to talk fellow demonstrators out of heaving the 40-pound (18kg) hulk of solid metal. This may come in handy someday, they argued, and hauled it away on bicycles.

More than three decades later, Zhou was stunned to see that the bulky relic of the rebellion had been secreted out of China for a new museum in New York.

The June 4th Memorial Museum opened a year ago through concerted efforts by Zhou and a few other veterans of the Tiananmen demonstrations now living in the United States. The urgency for a new museum came after the one in Hong Kong was closed down by the authorities there in 2021.

“We viewed this as the effort to erase the memories,” David Dahai Yu, the museum’s director, told Al Jazeera. “We want people to understand why [Tiananmen] happened and what it means…to tell the story.”

On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government deployed armed troops to crush mass student-led protests that had occupied Tiananmen Square for weeks. At least hundreds of protesters and bystanders, if not more, are believed to have been killed .

In the years afterwards, Hong Kong held an annual mass candlelight vigil for all those who perished, without any interference from Chinese authorities who snubbed out even private memorials in mainland China. And finally, in 2014, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, a coalition initially formed in 1989 to help the mainland protesters, founded the museum.

Times have changed, however. Since 2020, the only city on Chinese soil where the public was free to mark June 4th is now under two draconian national security laws , which ban the annual vigil with threats of arrest and jail time . The Hong Kong museum was shut down just two days before the 32nd anniversary in 2021 and all the exhibits were confiscated.

‘So much that I never knew’

Not all was lost. Instead, as news of the US museum spread, more artefacts from that heady Beijing spring began to appear.

Soon after Zhou and others spread the word on their new museum in the heart of Manhattan’s shopping district, they started receiving unexpected items: the blood-splattered blouse of a reporter who worked for the People’s Liberation Army newspaper; the leaflets distributed by Zhou; a medal and commemorative watch awarded to “the defenders of the motherland”, as Beijing dubbed the soldiers who suppressed the movement.

There was even a like-new Nikko tent, one of the hundreds ferried in from Hong Kong and kept as a memento by a pair of protesters who camped in the square as newlyweds.

Another item bound for the museum was an installation by exiled Chinese artist Chen Weimin, which had been displayed for decades in a California desert.

An avid collector of all things Tiananmen, Zhou told Al Jazeera: “I learned in the process so much that I never knew before.”

Zhou was jailed in China for one year for his involvement in the protests before settling in the US in the early 1990s and founding a humanitarian NGO.

In recent years, he has been helping Hong Kong protesters who fled surveillance and arrest. He asked some of them to fill a room in the museum with an illustrated timeline of the 2019 antigovernment protests . A construction worker’s helmet and a yellow umbrella used by a protester were donated to the museum.

One of the 2019 protesters has parlayed his visual art training and renovation skills into designing the exhibit.

“It’s difficult to explain to outsiders why Hong Kong resorted to violent struggles,” said Locky Mak, 25, who landed in New York last year with only a backpack and requested to be known only by a pseudonym for fear of reprisal. “That said, I feel that [the Tiananmen veterans] admire the Hong Kong people and are very supportive of our struggles.”

For Zhou, the focus of all the remembrances is not just about the tragic end. “It’s also about hope and solidarity: the other possibility for China,” he said.

However, splits emerged soon after Wang Dan, one of the most prominent Tiananmen student leaders and one of the museum’s founders, faced a slew of sexual harassment accusations and related civil lawsuits in Taipei, where he sometimes resides and where he co-founded the New School for Democracy in 2011.

When a group of mainland Chinese students in New York called out Wang in a public statement, they were banned from hosting events at the museum. Yu said he made the decision after they refused to retract their statement, which he called “one-sided”.

Even into its second year of operations, the all-volunteer-run museum has kept limited hours: opening only two days a week for four hours at a time. Fundraising, which kicked off in 2021 soon after the demise of the Hong Kong museum and buoyed by great enthusiasm, has grown sluggish and remains far short of the $2m initial goal. The $580,000 raised so far is sufficient for two more years of operations, according to Yu.

Jiao Ruilin, 31, started volunteering as a museum guide last July 2023, two months after leaving his native Shanghai for freedom in the US. Before, Jiao would learn dribs and drabs about Tiananmen by eavesdropping on whispers among his relatives.

“The exhibits have opened my eyes to the harm of the dictatorship,” Jiao said. “Of course, I want China to change, but I also realise the power of individuals may fall short in affecting change.”

Even so, the Tiananmen veterans are resolved to carry on. Except for a few fake Facebook pages, they said there has been no transnational sabotage from Beijing so far, despite the country’s growing international reach.

Andrew Nathan, a sinologist at New York’s Columbia University who co-edited The Tiananmen Papers, a trove of secret Chinese official documents on the protests and the crackdown, believes the resurrected museum is serving an important role.

“There’s nothing else that keeps the memories alive,” said Nathan.

Understanding Dante’s Circles of Hell in “The Divine Comedy”

This essay is about Dante Alighieri’s depiction of the nine circles of Hell in “The Divine Comedy.” It describes how each circle represents different sins and their corresponding punishments, illustrating the concept of divine justice. The first circle, Limbo, holds virtuous non-Christians, while subsequent circles progressively punish more severe sins such as lust, gluttony, and heresy. The seventh circle punishes violence, the eighth deals with fraud, and the ninth, Cocytus, is reserved for traitors. Through vivid imagery and symbolic punishments, Dante explores human morality and the consequences of sin, reflecting medieval Christian beliefs and offering timeless insights into the human condition.

How it works

Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy” is a cornerstone of literary history, offering a vivid portrayal of the afterlife through its three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The most intriguing and widely discussed section is the Inferno, where Dante describes the nine circles of Hell. These circles, each representing different sins and corresponding punishments, form a complex and intricate vision of divine justice. Understanding these circles provides insight not only into medieval Christian theology but also into human nature and morality.

Dante’s Hell is structured as a funnel descending in nine concentric circles, each progressively worse and housing souls guilty of increasingly severe sins. The first circle, Limbo, is for virtuous non-Christians and unbaptized infants. Though they are not tormented by physical suffering, they endure an eternity of longing for divine grace they can never attain. This circle sets the stage for the rest of Hell, emphasizing the importance of faith and divine grace in Dante’s worldview.

The second circle marks the beginning of active punishments. It is reserved for the lustful, who are blown about by a violent storm without rest. This eternal whirlwind symbolizes the power of carnal desires to disrupt lives and relationships. Famous historical lovers like Cleopatra and Helen of Troy reside here, illustrating the universal and timeless nature of such sins. Dante’s use of contrapasso, the concept of sinners suffering in a manner befitting their sins, becomes evident and is a recurring theme throughout the Inferno.

In the third circle, the gluttonous are punished by being forced to lie in a vile slush produced by ceaseless, foul rain. This reflects their overindulgence and lack of self-control in life, now manifesting as an unbearable, degrading condition in death. The fourth circle deals with the avaricious and the prodigal, who push heavy weights in a perpetual struggle, symbolizing their futile and excessive pursuit of wealth.

The fifth circle, the River Styx, is home to the wrathful and the sullen. The wrathful fight each other on the surface, while the sullen lie beneath the water, choking on their own resentment. This vivid imagery captures the destructive nature of anger and sullenness, highlighting how these emotions can consume individuals. Dante’s detailed descriptions of these punishments serve not only as a moral warning but also as a reflection on the human condition.

The sixth circle introduces the heretics, who are entombed in flaming graves. This punishment underscores the gravity of straying from accepted religious doctrines in Dante’s time, emphasizing the perceived dangers of heretical beliefs. As Dante and his guide Virgil progress deeper, they encounter the seventh circle, divided into three rings, where the violent are punished. Those who were violent against others are immersed in a river of boiling blood, while those who committed suicide are transformed into gnarled trees, tormented by harpies. Those violent against God, nature, or art suffer in a desert of flaming sand. Each punishment uniquely fits the crime, reinforcing the principle of divine justice.

The eighth circle, Malebolge, is reserved for fraudsters. It consists of ten bolgias, or ditches, each housing different types of fraudulent souls, from seducers to false prophets. Here, the punishments are particularly varied and severe, reflecting the complex and malicious nature of their sins. For instance, flatterers are steeped in excrement, symbolizing the worthlessness of their deceitful words.

Finally, the ninth circle, Cocytus, is the frozen lake at the center of Hell, reserved for traitors. Here, the punishment is extreme, with the most treacherous sinners encased in ice. Betrayal, considered the worst sin by Dante, earns the harshest punishment. Lucifer himself resides here, eternally chewing on the greatest traitors: Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius.

Dante’s depiction of the circles of Hell is not just a theological map but a profound exploration of human morality and justice. Each circle serves as a reflection of the sins committed in life, with punishments that are poetic in their appropriateness. This intricate structure highlights the medieval belief in a divinely ordered universe where every action has consequences. It also offers timeless insights into the human psyche, making “The Divine Comedy” a lasting masterpiece in both literary and philosophical realms.

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). Understanding Dante's Circles of Hell in "The Divine Comedy" . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/understanding-dantes-circles-of-hell-in-the-divine-comedy/ [Accessed: 5 Jun. 2024]

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"Understanding Dante's Circles of Hell in "The Divine Comedy"," PapersOwl.com , 01-Jun-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/understanding-dantes-circles-of-hell-in-the-divine-comedy/. [Accessed: 5-Jun-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Understanding Dante's Circles of Hell in "The Divine Comedy" . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/understanding-dantes-circles-of-hell-in-the-divine-comedy/ [Accessed: 5-Jun-2024]

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