Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
Hammer (Tool)
We’ve all experienced retrieval failure in the form of the frustrating tip-of-the-
tongue phenomenon, in which we are certain that we know something that we are trying to
recall but cannot quite come up with it. You can try this one on your friends as well. Read your
friend the names of the 10 states listed in the sidebar below, and ask him to name the capital city
of each state. Now, for the capital cities that your friend can’t name, give him just the first letter
of the capital city. You’ll probably find that having the first letters of the cities helps with
retrieval. The tip-of-the-tongue experience is a very good example of the inability to retrieve
information that is actually stored in memory.
States and Capital Cities
Try this demonstration of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon with a classmate. Instructions are in the text.
Georgia (Atlanta)
Maryland (Annapolis)
California (Sacramento)
Louisiana (Baton Rouge)
Florida (Tallahassee)
Colorado (Denver)
New Jersey (Trenton)
Arizona (Phoenix)
Nebraska (Lincoln)
Kentucky (Frankfort)
We are more likely to be able to retrieve items from memory when conditions at retrieval are
similar to the conditions under which we encoded them. Context-dependent learning refers to an
increase in retrieval when the external situation in which information is learned matches the
situation in which it is remembered. Godden and Baddeley (1975) [7] conducted a study to test
this idea using scuba divers. They asked the divers to learn a list of words either when they were
on land or when they were underwater. Then they tested the divers on their memory, either in the