Retrieval Failure Flashcards
Summarise retrieval failure
• Retrieval failure occurs when people forget information due to insufficient cues. When information is initially placed in memory, associated cues are stored at the same time. If these cues are not available at the time of recall it may appear as if you have forgotten the information but, in fact, this is due to retrieval failure – not being able to access memories that are there.
• Tulving and Thomson (1973) suggest if cues are not present at the time of recall that were there during encoding, then the information is not accessible and therefore appears ‘forgotten’, (known as Encoding Specificity Principle)
Summarise context dependant cues
Cues may be External Cues. The absence of which can lead to Context-Dependent
Forgetting. Examples of external cues include associated words, places and smells.
Godden and badeley Carried out a study of deep sea divers working underwater. In this situation it is crucial – a matter of life or death – for divers to remember instructions given before diving.
Procedure:
• In this study the 18 divers learned a list of 36 unrelated words either underwater or on land and then were asked to free recall the words either underwater or on land.
• The word lists were recorded on tape and specialist equipment was used to play the words underwater.
• This created 4 conditions.
• Each diver took part in all conditions making it a repeated measures design.
What were the findings for godden and baddeley’s study ?
n two of these conditions the environmental contexts of learning and recall were the SAME and participants were less likely to forget (mean free-recall in condition: LL – 13.5 and condition 4: UU – 11.4), whereas in the conditions where the environmental context of learning and the context of recall were DIFFERENT, participants were more likely to forget (mean free-recall in conditions 2: UL - 8.5 and condition3: LU – 8.6). The external cues available were different from the ones available at recall and this led to retrieval failure.
Summarise state dependent forgetting
ues may also be Internal Cues. The absence of which can lead to State-Dependent Forgetting. Examples of internal cues include mood, emotional state and physiological state.
Goodwin et al (1969)
Carried out research into the effects of state-dependent forgetting.
Procedure:
• Male volunteers were required to learn a list of words when
they were either drunk or sober.
• Those in the ‘drunk’ condition were three times over the UK drink driving limit.
• Participants were asked to recall lists of words after 24 hours. Some were
sober, but others had to get drunk again.
What were the findings of Goodwins study ?
• The recall scores suggest that information learned when drunk makes forgetting less likely to occur when asked to recall in the same state later on i.e. drunk again later on.
Research support for SDF
Carter and Cassaday (1998) gave anti-histamine drugs to their participants to make them slightly drowsy. This created an internal physiological state different from the ‘normal’ state of being awake and alert. The participants then had to learn a list of words. It was found that in the conditions where there was a mismatch between internal state at learning and recall (e.g. recalling information drowsy but had been alert learning it) performance on the memory test was significantly worse. Moreover Eysenck (2010) argues that retrieval failure is the main reason for forgetting in LTM. This is a strength because supporting evidence increases the validity of the explanation. This is especially true when the evidence shows that retrieval failure occurs in real-life situations as well as in the highly controlled conditions of the laboratory.
Application to real world .
the cognitive interview whereby the interviewer encourages the interviewee to mentally recreate both the physical and psychological environment of the incident. Mental health professionals have also used this principle to aid therapy sessions and improve recovery from trauma or PTSD by using specific cues during treatment to increase clients’ ability to recall important details for their own benefit. This helps to improve recall as the same contextual and emotional cues are present to help retrieve the memories. This is a strength because retrieval failure research can be used to help us to avoid forgetting and to improve recall in important real-world situations.
Why do retrieval cues not always work?
Baddeley (1997) argued that contexts have to be very different before an effect is seen. For example, in Godden and Baddeley’s (1975) research the contexts of learning and recall are extremely different, e.g. Land or Underwater and the conclusions drawn from this suggest that forgetting occurs due to retrieval failure because the environment has changed. In the real world, learning material in one room and recalling it in another is unlikely to result in much forgetting because the environments are not different enough. This is a limitation because it means that that the real-life applications of retrieval failure due to contextual cues do not actually explain all forgetting, therefore the validity of this explanation for forgetting is reduced.
Recall vs recognition .
One limitation of retrieval failure theory is that context effects only occur when memory is tested in certain ways. Godden and Baddeley (1980) replicated their underwater experiment using a recognition test instead of recall. Participants had to say whether they recognised a word read to them from the list instead of retrieving it for themselves. When recognition was tested there was no-context dependent effect; performance was the same in all four conditions whether environmental contexts for learning and recall matched or not. This limits retrieval failure as an explanation for forgetting because the presence or absence of cues only affects memory when you test it in a certain way.
