Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) Year 13 Practice Test

Memory retrieval relies on cues present at the time of encoding. Godden and Baddeley showed this using divers who learned a list of words either underwater or on land and were later asked to recall in the same or the other context. The striking finding was that recall was best when learning and recall took place in the same environment, whereas switching contexts led to a notable drop in performance. The key quantified effect was about a 30% decrease in recall when the learning and recall contexts didn’t match. This demonstrates context-dependent forgetting: environmental cues from the learning setting aid retrieval, and those cues are missing when the test environment differs.