A03

• When is cue-dependent forgetting seen most strongly?

  In free recall experiments
• Why does forgetting not entirely depend on forgetting?

  Other processes are at work
• What other processes are at work in forgetting?

  Decay, interference and brain damage
• What happens when you lose the biological matter that holds memory?

  Forgetting will occur
• What type of examples are lots of the studies?

  Atypical and extreme
• Why does atypical and extreme examples a limitation?

  It maximises the likelihood of seeing effects
• Why would evidence for state and context dependent forgetting not show strong effects?

  If the context/state differences at learning and recall is less obvious
• What is the problem with materials used to test things in labs?

  Unlike things we need to remember in everyday life
• What are the materials they use in lab studies?

  Lists, digits etc
• Why does the lack of everyday material a problem?

  Leaves gaps in our understanding of forgetting
• Why is procedural memory a gap in our understanding?

  The ability to perform activities such as riding a bike isn't affected by cue dependent forgetting
• What did Tulving and Psotka examine?

  Whether forgetting from LTM is a product of absence of cure or interference
• S: Impressive range of evidence supports this explanation of forgetting?

  • E.g. Godden and Baddeley's research with deep sea divers
  • In fact, Eysenck (10) goes so far as to argue that retrieval failure is perhaps the main reason for forgetting in LTM
  • Supporting evidence increases the validity of an explanation, especially when conducted in real-life situations as well as the highly controlled conditions of the lad
• S: Context-related cues have useful everyday applications?

  • People often report these experiences: they were upstairs and when downstairs to get an item but forgot what they came downstairs for - when they go back upstairs they remember again
  • The application is that when we have trouble remembering something, it's probably worth making the effort to revisit the environment in which you first experienced it
  • This is a basic principle of the cognitive interview, a method of getting eyewitnesses to recall more information about crimes by using a technique - context reinstatement
• L: context effects are actually not very strong in real life?

  • Baddeley (66) argued that different contexts have to be very different indeed before an effect is seen
  • Learning something in one room and recalling it in another is unlikely to result in much forgetting because the environments aren't different enough
  • The real-life applications of retrieval failure due to contextual cues don't actually explain much forgetting
• L: Context effects only occurs when memory is tested in certain ways?

  • Godden and Baddeley (80) replicated their underwater experiment using a recognition test instead of recall
  • There was no context-dependent effect - performance was the same in all 4 conditions whether the environmental contexts of learning and recall matched or not
  • This limits retrieval failure as an explanation for forgetting because the presence or absence of cues only affects memory when you test recall rather than recognition
• L: ESP can't be tested and leads to circular reasoning?

  • When a cue produces successful recall of a word, we assume the cue must've been present at the time of learning
  • If a cue doesn't result in successful recall, then we assume that the cue wasn't encoded at the time of learning
  • There's no way to independently establish whether or not the cue has really been encoded