Psychology study question about Encoding specificity I`m conducting a study wher

Question

Psychology study question about Encoding specificity

I`m conducting a study where i test the class and then analyze their data based on a questionaire. I`m having a hard time figuring out how i`m going to fully debrief the students though - For the study, I have made 40 sentences with ambiguous meaning adjectives and CAPITALIZED nouns (ex skinny DIP and bean DIP), and then a bunch of distractor sentences. the students will have the sentences one by one in powerpoint, 4 seconds each, and then after that be given a distractor exercise (counting backwards by 3 from 50) to make sure that the recency effect is not there and they can`t cheat, and then given a questionairre with 10 sentences they have already been exposed to with one meaning (ex skinny DIP), and 10 sentences with the same noun but different context adjective then they saw in the powerpoint (bean DIP), and then 40 distractor sentences and asked to circle the capitalized noun which they remember from the powerpoint.

2 groups- 1 group which is told that their memory for the capitalized words will be tested, and 1 group is just told to pay attention to just the sentences overall meaning.

prediction is the group that was told to pay attention to the overall sentence will have a higher chance of remembering more words because they are paying attention to the context, and the group that is just paying attention to the capitalized word and not attaching as much meaning to it is not doing as well.

What I don`t understand is why we need these groups in the first place since really what we are doing is testing ENCODING SPECIFICITY .. which means that you are more likely to remember something the exact same context as you saw it originally, so why even care about the other group which is told to study the capitalized word on its own. can someone explain this more - what we are isolating and the need for 2 groups and the point behind all of this because i`m not as confident explaining this as I should be.

Explanation / Answer

Our memory is context dependent. It is most effective when information available at encoding is also available at retrieval. So, one of your groups is related to encoding and the other one is related to retrieval. This is done to find out the effectiveness of memory in both conditions and to prove the above principle that is encoding specificity principle.

I will simplify it. If a person is made to learn a word, he or she may not be able to recall it after some time. But if we make the person learn with certain related words, then it would be easier to recall.

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