GODDEN AND BADDELEY - 1975 CONTEXT DEPENDENT FORGETTING
15 males
Diving holiday in Scotland
5 females
house, cat , dog , sheep
bread, paper
... cat , dog , house car
house, car, money
money, sheep paper
Baddeley asked 18 deep-sea divers to memorize a list of 36 unrelated words of two or three syllables.
Can you please recite or recall the list of 36 words you were given
One group was asked to learn the list of words on the beach
Can you recall/ recite the list of 36 words you were given?
the 2nd group was to learn the list underwater
Findings from the environment the list was learnt vs where it was recalled
Learn : dry Recall: wet24%
Learn : wetRecall: wet32 %
Learn :dryRecall: dry 37%
When they were asked to remember the words half of the beach learners remained on the beach, the rest had to recall underwater.
Half of the underwater group remained there and the others had to recall on the beach.
Context is a retrieval cue, and when the cognitive environment is the same at recall and learning recall will be higher.The participants recalled more words when they learnt and recalled the words in the same environment than when they learnt and recalled the words in different environments.