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==Initial Findings==
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===Thomson and Tulving Initial Experiment===
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.
==Basic Methods==
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