PAPER 1 - Memory - Retrieval failure Flashcards
What does retrieval failure suggest?
That forgetting occurs when the cues present at the time of encoding the information are not present at the time of recall.
The memory is not lost it just can’t be accessed due to lack of cues.
What are cues?
Triggers of information recollection.
They can be external or internal.
What is Tulvigs encoding specificity principle?
The theory that retrieval is improved when the encoding context is the same as the retrieval context.
What are the two types of forgetting due to cues and retrieval failure?
Context-dependant
State-dependant
What is context-dependent forgetting?
When our external cues at the time of encoding do not match those present at recall
What is state-dependent forgetting?
When our internal cues at the time of encoding do not match those present at recall.
Give a strength of retrieval failure as an explanation for forgetting.
Eysenck has suggested that retrieval failure may be one of the main reasons that we forget information from the LTM. This, alongside the strictly-controlled conditions of a lab experiment
(reducing the biasing effects of extraneous and confounding variables), increases the validity of retrieval failure as an explanation for forgetting, due to more confidence being placed in these conclusions on the basis of such experimental designs.
Give 3 limitations of retrieval failures as an explanation for forgetting.
Findings from studies of retrieval failure lack ecological validity as Baddeley argued that it is difficult to find conditions in real-life which are as polar as water and land so questioned the existence of context effects in normal life. Therefore, retrieval failure may be best suited to explaining cases of forgetting where the cues associated with encoding and retrieval are uncommonly distinct, so does not provide an accurate depiction of forgetting in day to day life.
Godden and Baddeley repeated their underwater, deep-sea diver experiment (1975) but tested for the recognition of learnt words, as opposed to recall, and found no significant difference in accuracy of recognition between the matched and non-matched conditions. This suggests that retrieval failure may only explain forgetting for some types of memory, tested in specific ways and under certain conditions, hence not being a universal explanation. This further suggests that the findings from studies of retrieval failure suffer from poor generalisability.
The encoding specificity principle suffers from cyclical reasoning due to its over-reliance on assumptions. For example, it may not always be the case that differences between cues at the time of encoding and recall causes retrieval failure, but the cyclical nature of the ESP suggests that it is so.
