AO3 RF

• retrieval failure led to the development of the cognitive interview technique. this technique was developed to retrieve accurate eyewitness testimony and uses the principles of state and context dependent retrieval to aid memory. This suggests that the explanation has been useful in the real world
• Retrieval failure has practical applications - people who need to learn and recall information should ensure that the cues present when learning information are also present during recall. For example, when revising you should recreate cues that will also be present when in the exam hall e.g. no noise. therefore forgetting is reduced.
• this explanation can be seen as a better theory of forgetting than interference theory. this is because tulving et al found initially that the more word lists that were learnt, the less were remembered. this means the information interfered with each other leading to forgetting. however when given category names as cues. pts recalled about 70% of the words regardless of number of lists given. this demonstrates that information was in memory but inaccessible until given cues, showing retrieval failure is most logical explanation of forgetting
• however it can be argued that like most memory experiments the research lacks ecological validity. The majority of research support for retrieval failure uses unrealistic memory tests such as word lists which therefore does not represent the complexity of real life forgetting.