cue and state dependent forgetting

What is retrieval failure?

A form of forgetting that occurs when we don’t have the necessary cues to access memory.

What is the encoding specificity principle?

For a cue to aid memory, it must be present at encoding and retrieval.

Who proposed the encoding specificity principle?

Tulving

What are the two types of retrieval failure?

Context-dependent forgetting and state dependent forgetting

Define context dependent forgetting.

External cues i.e. the environment that we are in at the time of encoding should be the same at retrieval for effective recall.

Define state-dependent forgetting.

Internal cues i.e. our emotional/psychological state at the time of encoding should be the same at retrieval for memory.

One strength is that there is evidence in support of cue dependent forgetting

It is seen as the main type of forgetting in LTM due to the amount of research evidence supporting the importance of cues and how they can trigger memory e.g. Godden and Baddeley investigated cues from the environment by asking deep sea divers to learn words on land and then recall the words either in the same environment (on land) or in a different environment (in the sea). They found that those who recalled the words in the sea showed a 30% deficit in comparison to those who recalled the words on land which proved that environmental contexts do affect memory. There is real world application e.g. the cognitive interview which is used by the police to aid eyewitness testimonies. It helps us to understand how taking victims back to the scene of the crime can trigger memories as it reinstates the context, which can help in the conviction of offenders

evidence in support of state dependent forgetting

Overton asked ps to learn information in one of 2 states either when sober or when drunk they found that those who were given the information drunk had better recall when drunk than when sober. This suggest that emotional and psychological state also effect recall ability.

limitation

A key limitation is that there is another explanation interference with evidence in support with high ecological validity. For example, Baddeley and Hitch conducted a field experiment investigating interference in a real-life context rather than an artificial laboratory setting. They studied rugby players’ memory for matches they had played across a season and asked them to recall specific details. The researchers found that the number of intervening games was the only significant predictor of forgetting, rather than the passage of time. This supports the idea that interference, specifically retroactive interference, occurs when new information disrupts the recall of previously learned information. Because the study used naturally occurring events and meaningful material, the findings have greater ecological validity and can be more confidently generalised to everyday memory, strengthening interference as a valid explanation for forgetting. This suggests that this explanation can only be utilised part of the time and doses’t explain forgetting in all contexts