Research into why we remember some aviation disasters and forget others

Oxford University researchers have tracked how recent aircraft incidents or accidents trigger past events and how some are consistently more memorable than others. Using the English version of Wikipedia, they analysed articles about airline crashes that occurred between 2008 and 2016. They then measured how the traffic to articles about airline crashes or incidents before 2008 changed due to more recent events. They analysed page views of nearly 85,000 pairs of articles (which they named as “source articles” and “target articles”) and found there was a short-term attention span for recent crashes. More people appeared to look at articles about past crashes they remembered when their memory was triggered by the recent event.