Explanations for forgetting: Retrieval Failure Flashcards
What is retrieval failure?
Lack of accessibility rather than availability (information is there but not accessible) - occurs due to absence of cues
What are cues?
Things that serve as a reminder
Who proposed the encoding specificity principle?
Tulving & Thomson
What does the encoding specificity principle state?
Memory is most effective if information that was present at time of encoding is available at time of retrieval i.e. cues don’t have to be exactly right but the closer the cue to the OG item, the more useful it will be
How did Tucking and Pearlstone demonstrate the value of retrieval cues in their study?
Paticipants had to learn 48 words belonging to 12 categories - participants either had to do free recall or were given cues from the category names
free recall=40% of words recalled on average, cued-recall=60% of words recalled
This is evidence for the importance of cues in remembering something - helps create a meaningful link
How did Godden & Baddeley investigate the effect of contextual cues?
Researchers recruited scuba divers as participants + they learnt a set of words either on land or underwater, subsequently they were tested either on land of underwater - highest recall occurred when initial context matched the recall environment e.g. learning underwater = recalling under water
Who looked into state-dependent forgetting?
Goodwin et al
What did Goodwin et al find in their study?
Asked male volunteers to remember a list of words when they were either sober or drunk - asked to recall lists 24 hours later when some were sober and others had to get drunk again (experimental purposes) - recall scores suggest information learned when drunk is more available when in the same state
What is a weakness of retrieval cues?
They do not always work
The issue is the information being learnt is related more than just the cues. e.g. in most research participants are give lists of words which do not reflect the true complexity of learning something thus single cues are less easily triggered - called outshining hypothesis: a cues effectiveness is reduced by the presence of better cues
Why can retrieval failure be argued to be a circular argument?
Baddeley - the encoding specificity principle is impossible to test because it is circular - if a stimulus leads to the retrieval failure of a memory then according to the encoding specificity principle it can’t have been encoded - impossible to test for an item that has not been encoded
Cues DO NOT CAUSE retrieval failure but are ASSOCIATED with it
