Explanations for forgetting:Retrieval failure

For example, Godden and Baddeley's research with deep sea divers.

In fact Eysenck goes so far as to argue that retrieval failure is perhaps the main reason for forgetting in LTM.

Supporting evidence increases the validity of an explanation, especially when conducted in real-life situations as well as the highly controlled conditions of the lab. 

Baddeley argued that different contexts have to be very different indeed before an effect is seen (e.g. on land versus underwater). 

Learning something in one room and recalling it in another is unlikely to result in much forgetting because the environments are not different enough.

So the real-life applications of retrieval failure due to contextual cues don't actually explain much forgetting. 

Godden and Baddeley replicated their underwater experiment using are cognition test instead of recall.

There was no context-dependent effect. Performance was the same in all four conditions whether the envrionmental contexts for learning and recall match or not.

This limits retrieval failure as an explanation for forgetting because the presence or absence of cues only affects memory when you test recall rather than recognition. 

(A limitation is that Encoding Specificy Principle cannot be tested and leads to circular reasoning.)

When a cue produces successful recall of a word, we assume the cue must have been present at the time of learning.

If a cue does not result in successful recall, then we assume that the cue was not encoded at the time of learning.

But there is no way to independently establish whether or not the cue has really been encoded. 

People often report these experiences: they were upstairs and went downstairs and went downstairs to get an item but forgot what they came downstairs for. But when they go back upstairs, they remember again!

The application is that when we have trouble remembering something, it is probably worth making the effort to revisit the environment in which you first experienced it.

This is a basic principle of the cognitive interview, a method of getting eyewitnesses to recall more information about crimes by using a technique called 'context reinstatment'.