Talk:Encoding specificity principle

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Template:WAP assignment

Currently, the Wikipedia encoding specificity principle page does not adequately address the intricacies of the topic. We will add many subsections to the page, including basic methods, specific results, and theory, to improve the article's clarity. We will also include references to the Thompson and Tulving experiment, the first investigation to demonstrate the encoding specificity principle; many other successive studies were based off of this experiement. Currently, the Wikipedia page has no citations. We plan on citing several different experiments to further explain the principle. Examples of how the encoding specificity principle applies to every-day life will make it desirable to many audiences. Furthermore, we plan on contextualizing other areas of memory study - including availability and accessibility - to increase the article's detail. From initial research, we have deduced the encoding specificity principle is connected to semantics, an area we plan to expand upon.

DrewBlundell (talk) 14:37, 18 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Introduction confusion

At first glance, these two sentences in the introduction appear to contradict each other: "The principle explains why a subject is able to recall a target word as part of an unrelated word pair at retrieval with much more accuracy when prompted with the unrelated word than if presented with a semantically related word that was not available during encoding. In addition, people benefit equally from a weakly related cue word as from a strongly related cue word during a recall task, provided the weakly related word was present at encoding."

The first sentence seems to say that people benefit more from a weakly related cue. The second sentence says that people benefit equally well from a weakly or strongly related cue. I'm guessing that the early, and thus fundamental, papers in this area did not directly contradict each other. My point is simply that these sentences should be re-written to better represent their underlying research as, at the moment, they may be confusing to some: 1) Are unrelated/weak and semantically related/strong the same thing? 2) In the second sentence, was the strongly related cue present during encoding? etc... A.real.human.being (talk) 18:22, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, example sentence to fix it: Memory researchers such as Thomson and Tulving state that recall of memory is most effective when the context of encoding matches that of the retrieval. This "context" can be anything from the six senses to environmental cues. Then this sentence should be omitted and another example should be given: "The principle explains why a subject is able to recall a target word as part of an unrelated word pair at retrieval with much more accuracy when prompted with the unrelated word than if presented with a semantically related word that was not available during encoding." — Preceding unsigned comment added by RomainDecrop (talk • contribs) 20:21, 2 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The existing introductory paragraph is unnecessarily confusing. I agree with the above clarification, but suggest the following:

Memory researchers Thomson and Tulving suggest that recall from memory is most effective when the context at the time of encoding matches the context at the time of retrieval. This "context" can refer to physical location or surrounding, as well as mental state or mood of the individual. The context during (storage) determines what retrieval cues will be effective during retrieval. ^[1] I agree with the above correction for the second sentence, but think there should still be a mention of weak vs. strong cues. KieraMolloy18 (talk) 07:06, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Kiera Molloy[reply]

I think also having "mental state or mood" is a good addition to the paragraph. Adaaka (talk) 14:54, 19 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I went ahead and added a link to state-dependent memory at the end. Stephanie Parrado (talk) 19:30, 21 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the above suggestions. However, do you think that matching is the best word to use in the definition? I think that 'interaction' or 'relationship' between encoding context and retrieval context might be better wording. Just a suggestion. HalimahMohammed (talk) 03:05, 21 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

^ Endel, Tulving (1990). The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology. Basil Blackwell, Inc. pp. 135–137. ISBN o631rj68r8. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)

[1] Endel, Tulving (1990). The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology. Basil Blackwell, Inc. pp. 135–137. ISBN o631rj68r8. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)

[1]