Cdf - Failure to Recall Information Without Cues

CDF- failure to recall information without cues

This is where the internal mood or state can have an effect on the recall from long term memory such as the smell of something or the temperature being the same in the environments such as Abbernathy found out in 1940 that doing a test at home and then recalling at school under the same fragrance, this links to martin as he is revising for both lessons at home and will recall them in school, if he does these in different temperature such as he has the heating on at home and the window is open at school this could have a negative effect on martin however if he revised whilst having the same aftershave on and recalled with the same aftershave on this could help him recall better. Martin revising at home and recalling at school is a weakness as it suggests that CDF is a valid explanation of forgetting as there is a change being made this is the environments in, therefore martin will be most likely to not achieve his best score.

A real life application of this is when Godden and Baddeley in 1975 found out that to suggest that cues can affect recall of the information, this strengthens the theory of when the police conducted interviews with eyewitnesses at an incidence, they were asked to recall the incident by recreating the scenario they were asked to think about the context of the crime such as the weather and who was about exc. This was to improve recall for the eyewitnesses to improve the recall, this is a strength when linking to martin as he will think about the details such as it could have been raining outside his house therefore if he thinks about that moment of when it was raining he could be able to remember the French ford for chair instead of the Spanish word and not get mixed up. This is a strength as it shows that psychological research can have a real world impact when recalling by the environment and what was happening. This was used to improve the recall of eyewitness testing.

SDF- refers to the mood and the psychological state of someone when they encode and retrieve the information

The SDF theory suggest that any information that hasn’t been able to be retrieved is due to the lack of retrieval cues such as the mood of martin and the state such as if he is angry or drunk, however the information may not be rehearsed such as martin could revise relaxed at home but recall stressed this is due to he could be nervous for the test and may not do well as he knows that he might not too good, this is a weakness as the results lack ecological validity because martin is stressed and not thinking about real life examples such as if it was raining and it’s raining at school he could recall better.