AO3: Retrieval Failure

• Can explain why interference affects recall

  Tulving and Psotka found that when participants were given cued recall, the effects of interference disappeared. Participants remembered 70% of the words regardless of how many lists they were given. This might suggest that retrieval failure is a more important explanation of forgetting than interference, because when we use cues, the effects disappear, meaning that the information hasn't been forgotten, it just cannot be retrieved due to an absence of retrieval cues.
• Applications to improving EWT


  Retrieval cues have proven to be useful in improving EWT and developing the cognitive interview. For example, research by Milne and Bull found that 'report everything'(state-dependent cues) and 'context reinstatement'(contextual cues) were most effective techniques in gaining accurate and detailed recall in the cognitive interview. Therefore this explanation had had implications in increasing the accuracy of recall in EWT; if we know why people forget, we can develop tools to improve their memory.
• Retrieval cues don't always work

  Although, they may work in word lists in lab conditions, it doesn't mean to say that they work in everyday situations, especially when word lists are artificial tasks which are unlike how we learn in real life. For example, memory requires complex associations, it is unlikely that this will be triggered by one cue. This suggests that we encode everything, we just can't access it. Therefore, this explanation can only explain why we forget in experimental conditions, not real-life scenarios and therefore lacks ecological validity,