negative evaluluation of McGeoh and McDonalds study
it lacks ecological validity
for example:
the time between learning and recall is short term
eg a typical lab study takes 10-20 mins
- however, this is different from everyday life because we often learn something and then recall it a long time later eg a student revising and then needing to recall for a test weeks later
-therefore, because lab studies maximise the possibility of interferrence occuring they may exagerate its importance as a cause of forgetting and may not be particularly useful to explain the nature of forgetting in the real world
forgetting occurs due to the automatic decay of memory
Short-term memory can only keep information for a given period (usually between 15 and 30 seconds). If such information is not rehearsed, then such information decays and is no longer able to be remembered.
conclusion of tulving and pearlstones investigation on meaningful links and their effect on recall
this meaningful link can act as a trigger to help access a memory
this is evidence of cues that have been explicitly or implicitly encoded at the same time of learning and have a meaningful link to the learning material
findings of godden and baddeleys investigation into context dependant forgetting
where the environmental context of learning and recall were matched accurate recall was 40% higher than non-matched conditions because the external cues were different from the ones at recall which led to retrieval failure
- could be used to improve recall in places like exams
- abernathys research suggests that if you revise in the room where you sit your exams, you will get context cues and recall better
the cognitive interview/eyewitness testimony
- the cognitive interview uses retrival cues to improve memory by encouraging the witness to mentally recreate both the physical and psychological environment of the incident
-this technique has been found to improve recall of correct info by 34%
can explain interference as a source of forgetting
- tulving showed that retrieval failure is due to an abscence of cues
- recalling lists of words freely of cued
-the more lists a person had to remember the worse their free recall was due to retroactive interferrence BUT
-when participants were given categories, they remembered 70% of words regardless of how many lists they were given
- this shows that info is available but cannot be retrieved which shows that retrieval failure is a more important explanation than interference
- information we learn in everyday life is often more complex than just a list of words like in the experiments and requires more than just a cue to trigger it
- this has been called the outshining hypothesis
- so cues can explain some simple instances of forgetting but not everything
the 'myth of the encodingretrieval match'
-baddeley points out that the encoding specificity principle is impossible to test because it is circular in the sense that:
-if a memory is triggered by a cue then the cue must have been encoded in memory and if a memory is not triggered by a cue then it has not been encoded
-however it is impossible to test for something that hasn't been encoded so this cannot be proved
- so according to this criticism the cues do not cause retrival they are just associated with retrival