Explanations for forgetting: retrieval failure

• what is a reason why people forget information

  insufficient cues
• who reviewed research into retrieval failure and found a consistent pattern

  Endel Tulving
• what did Tulving call this pattern

  encoding specificity principle
• what is the encoding speciality principle

  it states that a cue has to be both present at encoding and present at retrieval

  it follows from this that if the cues available at encoding and retrieval are different there will be some forgettign
• what are the two examples of non-meaningful cues

  context-dependant forgetting - recall depends on external cue

  state-dependant forgetting - recall depends on internal cue
• what was the procedure for research from context-dependant forgetting

  Godden and Baddley

  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 the were asked to recall the words either underwater or on land

  this created four conditions
• what were the findings and conclusions on the divers experiment

  in two of these conditions the environmental contexts of learning and recall matched, whereas in the other two they did not.

  accurate recall was 40% lower in the non-matching conditions.

  they concluded that the external cues available at learning were different from the ones at recall and that this led to retrieval failure.
• what was the procedure for research on state-dependent forgetting

  Carter and Cassaday gave antihistamine drugs to their participants. they had a mild sedative effect making the pps slightly drowsy.

  the participants had to learn a list of words and passages of prose and then recall the information making four conditions.
• what were the findings of state-dependant forgetting

  in the conditions where there were mismatch between internal state at learning and recall performance were significantly worse. so when the cues are absent then there is more forgetting