A03 Retrieval Failure

• Supporting evidence


  An impressive range of research supports the retrieval failure explanation for forgetting: studies done by Baddeley and Godden and Carter and Cassaday are just 2 examples.
• Eysenck

  Researcher who states that retrieval failure is perhaps the main reasons for forgetting from LTM.
• Supporting evidence- Strength

  Supporting evidence increases the validity of an explanation; true when retrieval failure occurs in real life too rather just highly controlled lab experiments
• Questioning context effects

  Baddeley argues that context effects are not very strong especially in real life too. Different contexts have to be very different before an effect is seen. It would be hard to find a place as different from land as underwater
• Differences in environment

  Learning something in one room and recalling it in another wouldn't result in forgetting as environments are not different enough from each other. Thus, real-life applications of retrieval failure due to contextual cues don't actually explain much forgetting
• Recall vs recognition

  Baddeley and Godden replicated underwater experiment but used a recognition test where pts had to say whether they recognised a word read to them from the list, instead of retrieving it for themselves
• There were no context-dependent effects and performance was the same in all 4 conditions. Limitation because the presence/absence of cues only affects memory when tested in a certain way
• Problems with the encoding specificity principle (ESP)

  ESP isn't testable and leads to a form of circular reasoning. We assume the cue has been successfully/not successfully encoded at time of learning. These are only assumptions as there is no way to independently establish whether cue has been encode
• Real-life applications

  Baddeley suggest to pay attention to context-related cues. When we forget something, it is probably worth making the effort to try and remember and recall the environment in which we learned it first
• Cognitive interviews

  Baddeley's argument is a basic principle of the cognitive interview, a method of getting eyewitnesses to crimes to recall information