Retrieval failure:

• STRENGTH

  • Help to overcome forgetting in everyday situations
  • Although cues may not have a strong effect on forgetting Baddeley suggests they're still worth paying attention to
  • IE we all experienced being in 1 room and thinking I must go and an item from another room
  • You go to the other room and forget what you wanted
  • But the moment you go back to the first room you remember
  • When we have trouble remembering something its probably worth making the effort to recall the environment you learned it first

  Shows how research can give us strategies to use in the real world to improve our recall
• STRENGTH:

  • Impressive range of research that supports the retrieval failure explanation
  • Studies by Godden and Baddeley and Carter and Cassaday are just two examples because they show that a lack of relevant cues at recall can lead to context-dependent and state-dependent forgetting in everyday life
  • Memory researchers Eysenck and Keane (2010) argue that retrieval failure is perhaps the main reason for forgetting from LTM

  This evidence shows that retrieval failure occurs in real-world situations as well as in the highly controlled conditions of the lab
• LIMITATION:

  • Baddeley (1997) argues that context effects are actually not very strong especially in everyday life
  • Different contexts have to be very different indeed before an effect is seen
  • For example it would be hard to find an environment as different from land as underwater (Godden and Baddeley)
  • In contrast learning something in one room and recalling it in another is unlikely to result in much forgetting because these environments are generally not different enough

  This means that retrieval failure due to lack of contextual cues may not actually explain much everyday forgetting