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
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