Retrieval failure Flashcards
What is the encoding specificity principle?
Cues that are present when new material is learned and are also present at recall and may aid recall
What is retrieval failure?
When memory is available but not accessible
What are the two types of cues?
Meaningful or meaningless
What are the two types of forgetting?
Context-dependant and state-dependant
What is context-dependant forgetting?
Recall in environment different from where learning took place led to forgetting
What is state-dependant forgetting?
When your physical or psychological state is different from when learning took place
What are two studies than support retrieval failure?
Godden & Baddeley and Carter & Cassaday
What was Godden and Baddeley’s procedure?
Deep-sea divers learned a list of words either underwater or on land and then were asked to recall the words either underwater or on land, creating 4 different conditions
What were Godden and Baddeley’s findings and conclusions?
Accurate recall was 45% higher in the conditions where the environmental contexts of learning and recall matched. This suggests that forgetting occurs when there is an absence of cues that were encoded alongside the wordlist when it was learnt
What was Carter and Cassaday’s procedure?
Participants were given antihistamine drugs creating an internal drowsy state that is different from being alert and the participants had to learn lists, words and passages of prose then recall the information
What was Carter and Cassaday’s findings?
In the conditions where there was a mismatch between internal state at learning and recall, performance on the memory test was significantly worse. This suggests that forgetting occurs when there is an absence of state-dependant cues that were present when information was first learnt
What are limitations of this theory?
Godden and Baddeley’s replicated their underwater experiment but used a recognition test instead of recall where participants had to say whether they recognised a word read to the, from a list instead of retrieving it themselves. the context-dependant effect disappeared and recall performance was the same . Only applies to recall not recognition
