Retrieval Failure - forgetting

• What is retrieval failure?

  A form of forgetting.

  - It occurs when we don't have the necessary cues to access memory.

  - The memory is available but not accessible unless a suitable cue is provided.
• what is a cue?

  A trigger of information that allows us to access a memory

  -may be meaningful or may be indirectly linked by being encoded at the time of learning
• Who proposed and what is encoding specificity principle?


  -Tulving

  -States that a cue has to be present at both encoding and and at retrieval

  -If the cues at encoding and retrieval are different there will be some forgetting

  e.g. the cue 'STM' may lead you to recall all sorts of information about short term memory
• What is context-dependent forgetting?


  -Recall depends on external cue e.g place or weather

  like a classroom
• What is state-dependent forgetting?


  -Recall depends on internal cues e.g. feeling upset or being drunk
• Who conducted research on context-dependent forgetting?

  Godden and Baddeley (1975)
• Research on context-depending forgetting

  -Studied deep-sea divers who work underwater to see if training on land helped or hindered their work underwater

  -The divers learned a list of words either underwater or on land and then were asked to recall the words either underwater or on land

  FOUND THAT accurate recall was 40% lower in non-matching conditions and they concluded that external cues available at learning were different form the ones available at recall and this led to retrieval failure
• Who conducted research on state-dependent forgetting?

  Carter and Cassady (1998)
• Research on state dependent forgetting

  -gave drugs that treated hay fever to their participants - this has a mild sedative effect making the participants slightly drowsy

  -It creates an internal physiological state different from the normal state of being awake and alert

  FOUND that in the condition where there was a mismatch between internal state at learning and recall performance on memory test was significantly worse- SO WHEN CUES ARE ABSENT THERE IS MORE FORGETTING
• STRENGTH- REAL WORLD APPLICATION (retrieval failure)

  -retrieval cues can help to overcome some forgetting in everyday situations

  -Baddeley suggests that cue are worth paying attention to .

  -For instance, we have probably all had the experience going into a room and then forgetting what you wanted from the room

  -When we have trouble remembering something, it is worth making the effort to recall the environment in which you learned it first

  -THIS SHOWS HOW RESEARCH CAN REMIND US OF STRATEGIES WE USE IN THE REAL WORLD TO IMPROVE OUR RECALL
• STRENGTH- RESEARCH SUPPORT

  -Impressive range of research that supports the retrieval failure explanation

  e.g. Baddely and Godden & Carter and Cassaday

  This evidence shows that retrieval failure occurs in real-world situations as well as in the highly controlled conditions of the lab
• COUNTERPOINT- LIMITED EXPLANATORY POWER

  -Baddeley argues that context effects are actually not strong especially in everyday life as the context have to be very different

  -For example, it would be hard to find environments as different from land as underwater

  -In reality, learning something form one room and recalling in another is not going to cause much forgetting

  -This means the explanatory power is limited due to the lack of contextual cues which may not be able to explain much everyday forgetting
• LIMITATION- RECALL VS RECOGNITION (retrieval failure)

  -Context effects may depend substantially on the type of memory being tested

  -Godden and Baddeley replicated their underwater experiment but used a recognition test instead of recall.

  When recognition was tested there was no context-dependent effect, performance was the same in all four conditions

  -SUGGEST THAT RETRIEVAL FAILURE IS A LIMITED EXPLANATION FOR FORGETTING AS IT ONLY APPLIES WHEN A PERSON HAS TO RECALL INFORMATION RATHER THAN RECOGNISE IT