PSYCO258 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Lobotomy, Episodic Memory, Prefrontal Cortex
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Principle of encoding specificity: the way an item is retrieved depends on how the item was encoded. A cue is more likely to trigger the recall of an item if it was initially encoded with the item. Ex. participants were asked to learn 24 pairs of weakly associated words (ex. plant bug) they were then shown another list of words and asked to write down the first word that came to mind. Although people wrote 18 words from the original list, they only remembered 4 as being part of the original list. When given weak cue words, they recalled 15. Recognition failure of recognizable words: words generated in response were the same as targets but weren"t recognized as such. Nature of encoding influences its memory trace weak cues were better retrieval tools because they were present during encoding. Strong cues for target words are due to general knowledge.