Retrieval Failure

Retrieval Failure: A form of forgetting which occurs when we don’t have the necessary cues to access memory. The memory is available but not accessible unless a suitable cue is provided.

Cue: A ‘trigger’ of information that allows us to access a memory. Such cues may be meaningful or may be indirectly linked by being encoded at the time of learning. Indirect cues may be external (environmental context) or internal (mood or degree of drunkenness).

Encoding Specificity Principle: States that cue has to be present at encoding and present at retrieval to be useful. If the cues available at encoding and retrieval are different there will be some forgetting.

Context-Dependent Forgetting: Recall depends on external cues.

State-Dependent Forgetting: Recall depends on internal cues.

Godden and Baddeley (1975): Divers that learned a list of words either underwater or on land did better in recall when they were recalled in the same condition they were learnt. Accurate recall in non-matching conditions was 40% lower than in matching conditions. They concluded that external cues that differed in learning than the ones available in recall led to retrieval failure.

Carter and Cassaday (1998): Participants learned and recalled a list words either on an antihistamine or not. When they learned and recalled the words in matching conditions (on the drug or not), the performance on recall was significantly better than mismatched conditions.

Real-World Application: Retrieval cues can help to overcome some forgetting in everyday situations. Baddeley suggests when we trouble remembering something, it is probably worth making the effort to recall the environment in which you learned it first.

Research Support: Godden and Baddeley and Carter and Cassaday support that a lack of relevant cues at recall can lead to context-dependent and state-dependent forgetting in everyday life. Eysenck and Keane argue that retrieval failure is perhaps the main reason for forgetting from LTM.

Counterpoint to Research Support: Baddeley argues that context effects aren’t strong, especially in everyday life as different contexts have to be very different for the effect to be seen. Being in different rooms is unlikely to result in much forgetting.

Limitation of Context Effects: When Godden and Baddeley replicated their underwater experiment using recognition instead of recall, there was no context-dependent effect and so performance was the same in all four conditions.