Retrieval Failure - evaluation

Question 1

There is a lot of evidence to support retrieval failure

Answer 1

• Godden and Baddeley’s research on context-dependent forgetting
• Goodwin et al’s research state-dependent forgetting
• This increases the validity of retrieval failure, especially when conducted in real-life situations as well as lab conditions

Question 2

Context-related cues have useful everyday applications

Answer 2

• Revision techniques
• People often report these experiences (going back to a place to remember something)
• The cognitive interview → ‘context reinstatement’ - improves accuracy of EWT

Question 3

Context effects are actually not very strong in real life

Answer 3

• Baddeley (1966) argued that different contexts have to be very different before an effect is seen
• Learning something in one room and recalling it in another is unlikely to result in much forgetting because the environments are not different enough
• Retrieval failure doesn’t fully explain forgetting

Question 4

Context effects only occurs when memory is tested in a certain way

Answer 4

Godden and Baddeley (1980) replicated their underwater experiment using a recognition test instead of recall
- There was no context-dependent effect (performance was the same in all four conditions)
- The absence of cues only affects memory when you test recall rather than recognition

Question 5

Encoding specificity principle (ESP) cannot be tested

Answer 5

• When a cue produces successful recall of a word, we assume the cue must have been present at the time of learning
• If a cue does not result in successful recall, we assume the cue was not encoded at the time of learning
• But there is no way to independently establish whether or not the cue has been encoded