MEMORY Explanations for Forgetting

TASK  Read the AO1 information on Retrieval Failure (p25&26)  Turn this information into pictures to represent what it shows  You can use as many pictures, symbols, colours, numbers, abbreviations, acronyms, individual letters (e.g. your own key to represent certain words) as you like  You can use a maximum of 15 whole words to help you  By the end of the time limit, you should be able to explain the Retrieval Failure theory and its research using your pictures only

DISCUSSION TASK TASK: How can you use this information to aid your own learning and exam performance? Give at least 3 suggestions & write them onto your booklet 3mins TASK: How can you use this information to aid your own learning and exam performance? Give at least 3 suggestions & write them onto your booklet 3mins

Practical applications  A strength of the retrieval failure explanation of forgetting is that it has practical applications.  This is because people who need to learn and recall information (e.g. students) should ensure that the cues present when learning/revising information are also present when recalling the information.  For example, when revising you should recreate cues that will also be present when in the exam hall e.g. no noise, sitting at a desk, not hungry etc. Research by Smith shows that even imagining the room you were in when learning information is just as effective as being in the same room, so students should imagine the room in which they revised to trigger retrieval cues.  This suggests that this explanation has been beneficial to society.

Practical applications  Another practical use of retrieval failure has been in the development of the Cognitive Interview Technique.  This technique (see later) was developed to help retrieve accurate eyewitness testimony and uses the principles of state- and context-dependent retrieval to aid memory.  This again suggests that this explanation has been useful in the real world.

 A strength of this explanation is that it can be seen as a better theory of forgetting than interference theory.  This is because Tulving & Psotka found initially that the more word lists that pts learnt, the less they remembered. This implied that the information had interfered with each other leading to forgetting.  However, when given category names as cues, pts recalled about 70% of the words, regardless of the number of lists given.  This demonstrated therefore that the information was in memory (available) but inaccessible until given cues, showing that retrieval failure is the most logical explanation of forgetting.

 There is much research support to demonstrate that a lack of retrieval cues lead to forgetting.  For example, research by Godden and Baddeley found……. /Bower found……. (pick one of these and SUMMARISE /Smith found….. findings only) There is a variety of research from both lab and field experiments, including research using meaningful material (e.g. where you put your keys!)  This suggests that this is a valid explanation.

 On the other hand, it can be argued that like most memory experiments, the research lacks ecological validity.  The majority of research support for retrieval failure uses unrealistic memory tests such as word lists which therefore not does not represent the complexity of recall life forgetting.

Challenge AO3 A LEVEL  A limitation of cue-dependent forgetting is that it can lead to a circular argument.  For example, Baddeley suggested that you cannot test the ESP because It leads to circular reasoning. If in an experiment a cue leads to successful recall, this suggests that it was present at learning. If however it does not lead to recall then we assume it wasn’t present at learning.  Consequently, both findings lead to support for the explanation which makes it unfalsifiable!