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The success of retrieval depends heavily upon what types of retrieval cues are present. Donald M. Thomson and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_Tulving Endel Tulving] first proposed the idea that retrieval will be most successful if information available at encoding is also present at retrieval, regardless of how strongly the cues are related to the to-be-remembered words. They theorized that “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.”2 This hypothesis for understanding how contextual information affects the retrieval of an episodic memory has been proven in a plethora of studies and is now known as the encoding specificity principle.
==Initial Findings==
===Thomson and Tulving===
In 1973, Endel Tulving and Donald M. Thompson released a study commenting on the connection between context-dependent word pairs (cued recall). They also studied the difference between the semantic memory encoding process and an episodic memory encoding process. The researchers proposed that if a word pair consisting of a target word and a cue word was presented to a participant, the best recall for the target word will be the cue word even if the two are not semantically similar. They hypothesize that the unrelated cue word presented with the target word at encoding will be a more effective recall cue for the target word than a strong semantically related word that was not present at encoding. For example, if the word pair chair-glue was presented, the cue glue would more rapidly trigger the target, chair, than would a word that was semantically related to the word “chair,” simply because both were present at encoding and retrieval.
To explore this hypothesis, Thompson and Tulving’s experiment focused on three categories of words: Target words (the desired response when a cue was presented), strong cues (words that are semantically linked to the target words), and weak cues (words that are presented alongside target words in the original word pair). The results of the experiment validated Thompson and Tulving’s hypothesis. 24% of all strong cue-target word pairs (semantically linked, not simultaneously presented) were correctly identified. However, when participants were presented with the weak word cue that was originally present at encoding, they were able to correctly identify the target word 63% of the time, even though the target word and cue word were weakly semantically related. This is a 39% increase in accuracy compared to the semantically related cue-target pairs. Tulving and Thomson found, therefore, that change in context mattered for memory retrieval. It was based upon these findings that Tulving and Thomson were able to propose the encoding specificity principle.
===Two-Phase Prompted Recall===
==Basic Methods==
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