Retrieval: Getting Information Out of Memory • 185conditions, it might make sense to study under silent
conditions. (Interestingly, a number of my students
report that having outside stimulation such as music
or television present helps them study. This idea clearly
violates the principle of encoding specifi city. Can you
think of some reasons that students might nonetheless
say this?)State-Dependent Learning Another example of how
matching the conditions at encoding and retrieval can
infl uence memory is state-dependent learning—learning
that is associated with a particular internal state, such
as mood or state of awareness. According to the prin-
ciple of state-dependent learning, memory will be better
when a person’s internal state during retrieval matches
his or her internal state during encoding. For example,
Eric Eich and Janet Metcalfe (1989) demonstrated that
memory is better when a person’s mood during retrieval
matches his or her mood during encoding. They did
this by asking participants to think positive thoughts
while listening to “merry” music or depressing thoughts
while listening to “melancholic” music (● Figure 7.14a).
Participants rated their mood while listening to the
music, and the encoding part of the experiment began
when their rating reached “very pleasant” or “very unpleasant.” Once this occurred,
usually within 15–20 minutes, participants studied lists of words while in their positive
or negative mood.
After the study session ended, the participants were told to return in 2 days (although
those in the sad group stayed in the lab a little longer, snacking on cookies and chatting
with the experimenter while happy music played in the background, so they wouldn’t
leave the laboratory in a bad mood). Two days later, the participants returned, and
the same procedure was used to put them in a positive or negative mood. When they
reached the mood, they were given a memory test for the words they had studied 2
days earlier. The results, shown in Figure 7.14b, indicate that they did better when their
mood at retrieval matched their mood during encoding (also see Eich, 1995).
The two ways of matching encoding and retrieval that we have described
so far have involved matching the physical situation (encoding specifi city) or
an internal feeling (state-dependent learning). Our next example of matching is
not quite as obvious, because it involves matching the type of processing that is
going on in a person’s head. This type of matching is called transfer-appropriate
processing.Transfer-Appropriate Processing The phenomenon of transfer-appropriate pro-
cessing shows that memory performance is enhanced if the type of task at encoding
matches the type of task at retrieval. A transfer-appropriate processing experiment
varies the type of task used for encoding and the task used for retrieval. We can
understand what this means by considering two of the groups of participants in an
experiment by Donald Morris and coworkers (1977).
Morris’s experiment had two parts: encoding and retrieval. The encoding part
of the experiment had two conditions: (1) the meaning condition, in which the task
focused on the meaning of a word, and (2) the rhyming condition, in which the
task focused on the sound of a word (● Figure 7.15). Participants in both condi-
tions heard a sentence with one word replaced by the word “blank”; 2 seconds
later, they heard a target word. The task for the memory group was to answer
“yes” or “no” based on the meaning of the sentence created by replacing “blank”
with the target word. The task for the rhyming group was to answer “yes” or
“no” based on the rhyme created by replacing “blank” with the target word. Here● FIGURE 7.14 (a) Design for Eich and Metcalfe’s (1989) “mood”
experiment. (b) Results of the experiment.
TEST Sad Happy Sad Happy
(a)(b)
302010
Test score
0STUDY Sad Happy
● FIGURE 7.15 Design and results
for the Morris et al. (1977) transfer-
appropriate processing experiment.
Participants who did a rhyming-based
encoding task did better on the
rhyming test than participants who did
a meaning-based encoding task. This
result would not be predicted by levels-
of-processing theory, but is predicted
by the principle that better retrieval
occurs if the encoding and retrieval
tasks are matched.
Meaning
taskRhyming
recognition
testRhyming
taskRhyming
recognition
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