Ah yes, it is Tulving,
Cue-Dependent Forgetting
Tulving says State-Dependant Forgetting and Context-Dependant Forgetting are both examples of Cue-Dependant Forgetting. Retrieved cues are either encoded with the material to be remembered when it’s first learnt, or can be used as prods when we are searching our memories. Tulving says we fail to retrieve something if these cues fail to match what is encoded in our memories.
State-Dependent Forgetting
If we learn something when we are feeling happy/sad/drunk, we will be able to remember what we have learnt when we are feeling happy/sad/drunk again, but not when we are in a different state.
Examples:
Remembering many bad things when we’re in a bad mood.
Not being able to remember sad things when we’re happy.
Remembering all the things someone has done in the past to anger you when you are annoyed by them but raving about them when they please you.
Context Dependent Forgetting
If we learn something in a particular situation then we will be able to recall something in a similar situation, however, we may have difficulty in recalling it in a different situation. E.g. we recognise our dentist at a garden party but we forget his name and who he is. We have no difficulty remembering this when we are in his surgery.
Case Studies
Abernethy (1940)
Abernethy asked one group of Participants to learn and recall something in one room and then asked a second group of participants to learn in one room and recall in another. They found the first group did much better.
Godden and Baddeley
Godden and Baddeley asked divers to learn word lists either on land or under water. They were then asked to recall the words either in the same context, or in a different context. They found that where they had to recall words in the same context as they had been learnt there was a 30% improvement. This was a dramatic change, in real life there may be smaller but still important effects.
Tulving’s Encoding Specificity Principle (ESP)
This refers to the problem of how closely released the encoding cue and retrieval cue must be for the latter to be effective. Tulving says cues only help us to retrieve information if they have been encoded (taken in) at the same time as learning takes place.
In the following study, the cues were encoded at the same time as learning took place.
Tulving and Pearlstone (1966)
The contextual cue in this study was the category name of the words that the participants learnt. They were read lists of different numbers of words. They were given the category name and asked to memorise the exemplars e.g. the category name “Animal” would include the exemplar “Dog”. Half the participants used free recall, that is, they wrote down the words they could remember on a blank piece of paper. The others were given the category names as cues and they recalled many more words. They did particularly well with the very long lists. When the free recall group were also given category names their recall also improved because the category names helped them access material that was available to them.