Recall depends on the overlap between the cues present at retrieval and those present when the memory was formed, so a cue's usefulness is not a property of the cue alone.
Tulving and Thomson showed in 1973 that a strong semantic associate can fail as a cue while a weak one that was present at encoding succeeds. The principle reframes forgetting as retrieval failure under the wrong cues rather than loss of the trace, and predicts the context effects found since, including recall being better in the room where the learning happened.
In practice
- A name that will not come in the office arrives instantly on walking into the building where you met.
- A procedure learned in a simulator is recalled less well in the control room than one learned in the control room.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop