Forgetting – Retrieval Failure
LTM problems of access, not availability (LTM is ‘permanent’ and ‘unlimited’)
Cue – dependent forgetting.
Retrieval failure:
The reason we forget is due to insufficient failures:
- When we encode a new memory, we also store information that occurred around it –
cues.
- If the cues are not present at recall then it is hard to retrieve the memory. It is still
available – we just can’t access the memory due to lack of cues.
Theory – encoding – specified principle (Tulving)
“The greater the similarity between the encoding event and the retrieval event, the
greater the likelihood of recalling the original memory”.
If a cue is to help recall, it must be present at encoding and at retrieval.
E.g., mnemonic techniques.
The effectiveness of the cue depends on:
o Overload (number of items)
o Depth of cue processing
o How well the cue fits the information
Negative - Cannot be tested – whether the cue has been encoded or not is just assumed based
on recall or no recall.
Support for lack of cues – Tulving and Psotka (1971)
- List of words to remember with headings that did not need to be remembered.
- Free recall condition – not given headings.
o They remembered less that the cued recall condition.
- Given the headings.
o Remembered 70% of words.
- Free recalled condition experienced retroactive interference – but effects disappeared
in cued recall
Summary:
- Recall is dependent upon accessing info by remembering the retrieval cue under
which the info is stored.
- Retrieval cues can be external (context) or internal (state)
- Forgotten information is still stored, bbut is (temporarily) inaccessible.
- Predicts that
Context Dependent Failure
Forgetting – Retrieval Failure
Recalling in a different external setting to coding.
- Abernathy (1940) – recall who's with unfamiliar teacher in an unfamiliar room.
- Godden and Baddeley – (1975) divers learning information on land or in water (but
are all settings this different?) recall was 40% lower in non – matching onditions.
- Smith (1970)
o Same room – 18/80 words.
o Different room – 12/80
o PP’s who imagined themselves back in original room recalled avg 17/80.
- Aggleton and Wasket (1999) – smells an act as cues and last for several years (Viking
museum).
EVALUATION:
- Limited ecological validity – artificial task – we are not usually asked to learn a list of
meaningless words – effects only works when tested in certain ways.
- However, it wads a controlled experiment so it can be replicated, and reliability can
be tested.
- Demand characteristics – participants may be aware of what the experimenter is
experimenting so they will try harder to remember things (words, diver instructions).
- Difficult to disprove as if recall does not occur it is because the information is not
stored or because you are not providing the right cues.
- Real life application – improving EWT earn witnesses are asked to describe the
context in which the incident happened during cognitive interviews.
State dependent forgetting
- Things happening internally.
Carter and Cassiday (1998) – how well could people remember instructions of how to take
medications after being cured?
Findings:
- Mismatch between internal state at learning and recall resulted in significantly worse
performance recalling words or prose.
SUPPORTING EVIDENCE:
- Goodwin et al. (1969) – when sober, heavy drinkers forgot where they had put things
but remembered once they drank sufficient alcohol.
- Overton (1972) – found same thing as Goodwin et al. – level of alcohol at coding and
retrieval had a positive correlation on recall.
- Eich (1980) and Darley et al. (1973) found similar findings to heavy marijuana users.
Marian and Fausey (1986):
- Found that memory for a story was better if the language in which it was presented
and the language that was used to test memory was the same.
Forgetting – Retrieval Failure
- participants who heard the story in Spanish and. We’re asked questions in English
were less accurate.
- This was because the environmental cues present at encoding were absent at recall.
