Tulving & Thomson (1973)

Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory.

Psychological Review, 80(5), 352-373

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Abstract

Recent changes in pretheoretical orientation toward problems of human memory have brought with them a concern with retrieval processes, and a number of early versions of theories of retrieval have been constructed. This paper describes and evaluates explanations offered by these theories to account for the effect of extralist cuing, facilitation of recall of list items by non-list items. Experiments designed to test the currently most popular theory of retrieval, the generation-recognition theory, yielded results incompatible not only with generation-recognition models, but most other theories as well: under certain conditions subjects consistently failed to recognize many recallable list words. Several tentative explanations of this phenomenon of recognition failure were subsumed under the encoding specificity principle according to which the memory trace of an event and hence the properties of effective retrieval cue are determined by the specific encoding operations performed by the system on the input stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Reference

Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological Review, 80(5), 352-373.

What Rests on This

1 mechanism cites this source. Each finding below is quoted as it appears on that mechanism's own page.

Context-Dependent Retrieval Memory Processes

Definition

The encoding specificity principle holds that a retrieval cue helps only to the extent that its information was stored together with the target at learning, so what counts as a matching context is fixed by how the event was encoded, not by how strongly the cue and target are related in general