The choice of focusing on ED is anchored on many reasons: 1) ED, with the Emergency Room, is the door between the territory and the hospital and the main entry for complex and urgent care needs. This is where processes start being aggregated, where interconnections between distinctive competencies, resources, and professional collaborations must be developed rapidly to guarantee the QoS. 2) ED is a complex intersection among different health care logics, implying different perspectives of care and treatment

In this dissertation, we investigate the qualitative structure, phenomenology, recollective experience, and determinants of ‘Flashbulb memories (FBMs)’ – autobiographical recalls of the circumstances in which an individual learned about an important and emotionally arousing public event – and their associated ‘Event memories (EMs)’ – non-autobiographical recalls of the event in itself. Research on FBMs is currently enduring heated theoretical debates about the ‘special status’ of these memories, and their relationship with EMs. We address these issues in light of two chief hypotheses: (1) FBMs are ‘special’ because of their iconicity, (2) FBMs and EMs rely on different memory systems. Along these premises, we present a systematic review of the literature and three empirical studies focusing on real-life public events. Along these, we adopt a test-retest methodology with long retention times to investigate FBMs’ and EMs’ evolution, and the factors underlying their formation and maintenance. Results of the systematic review show that FBMs are characterised by exceptional vividness and perceptive features. Building on this, we propose a new theoretical frame (Studies 1 and 2) in which we identify and characterize ‘perceptive core images’, a memory component that we argue is crucial in explaining the nature of FBMs and facilitating their long-term retrieval. Finally, we show (Study 3) that the long-term evolutions of FBMs and EMs are independent; and that the two are characterized by different recollective processes and predicted by different factors. Theoretical and practical implications of this frame are discussed.