Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

4-25-2025

Keywords

cognitive strategies, encoding, memory, memory task, retrieval

Disciplines

Developmental Psychology

Abstract

If questioned, we can all probably describe a strategy we employed to try to remember relevant information (e.g., I rehearsed the definitions, I generated examples of the definitions) for some future event (e.g., a test). Essentially, memory strategies help manage encoding and retrieval demands given a particular memory task. In the example of a test, we must figure out how to remember all the material covered on the test. This task requires that our studying allow us to discriminate the information at test. Famous psychologist, Endel Tulving, demonstrated the Encoding Specificity Principle that posits that the more similar the retrieval cues are at test to encoding the more likely the information will be retrieved. In essence, specificity of cues allows for discrimination between potential memory traces so the correct memory trace is retrieved at test.

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