Introduction

Suppose you are given a list of words to remember. What do you think determines how well you will remember something? Is it the amount of time you have to memorize the words? Is it the memorizing strategy you used? Is it the way you are asked to remember it? It may surprise you to learn that, according to one of the most renowned memory theorists of all time, Ivan Tulving, the answer is ‘none of the above’. Tulving argued that the ability to remember is a result of an interaction between what happens during encoding and what happens during recall, a phenomenon known as ‘encoding specificity’. Tulving predicted that when the context in the learning and test conditions is most similar, memory performance will be best. The principle of encoding specificity predicts that the best memory cues are not necessarily just ones closely associated with a to-be-remembered item, but cues that were also present at the time of encoding. In the present experiment, we will look at your memory for a series of cued words.