Psych: Retrieval Failure

• Encoding specificity principle


  Memory is most effective if information that was present at encoding is also available at the time of retrieval
• The cue doesn't have to be exactly right, but the closer, the better
• Encoding specificity principle


  • Environment context
  • Emotional context
• Godden & Baddeley 1975


  • Deep sea divers were given a word list to remember
  • Learnt on beach, recalled on beach
  • Learnt underwater, recalled underwater
  • Learnt on beach, recalled underwater
  • Learnt underwater, recalled on beach
  • 40% of words were more forgotten in different environment
• Tulving - Pearlstone


  • Participants learnt 48 words with 12 categories
  • Words were presented as category + word
  • 2 conditions: recall as many words possible & given cues to help
  • In free recall - 40% recalled
  • In cued recall - 60% recalled
• State-dependent forgetting


  Recall is best when in the same state as when learning
• Carter & Cassaday 1998


  • Gave antihistamines to participants
  • Had to learn a list of words
  • Recall was best when in the same state
• Retrieval failure


  One of the main reasons that we forget information from the LTM
• Conditions of a lab experiment

  • Strictly-controlled
  • Reducing the biasing effects of extraneous and confounding variables
• Strictly-controlled lab conditions


  Increases the validity of retrieval failure as an explanation for forgetting
• The findings from studies of retrieval failure may lack ecological validity
• Ecological validity


  The extent to which the findings from a study can be generalised to real-life situations
• Baddeley argued that it is difficult to find conditions in real-life which are as polar as water and land, and thus questioned the existence of context effects in normal life
• This suggests that retrieval failure may be best suited to explaining cases of forgetting where the cues associated with encoding and retrieval are uncommonly distinct, thus not providing an accurate depiction of forgetting in day to day life
• Godden and Baddeley repeated their underwater, deep-sea diver experiment (1975) but tested for the recognition of learnt words, as opposed to recall, and found no significant difference in accuracy of recognition between the matched and non-matched conditions
• This suggests that retrieval failure may only explain forgetting for some types of memory, tested in specific ways and under certain conditions, hence not being a universal explanation
• This further suggests that the findings from studies of retrieval failure suffer from poor generalisability
• The encoding specificity principle suffers from cyclical reasoning due to its over-reliance on assumptions
• It may not always be the case that differences between cues at the time of encoding and recall causes retrieval failure, but the cyclical nature of the ESP suggests that it is so