Q.Priya cannot recall the name of a classmate's hometown when asked directly, but the moment her friend says, 'It's a hill station, starts with the letter M', she immediately remembers it is Munnar. Explain why Priya could not recall the name at first, using the concept of retrieval failure.

Forgetting does not only occur because memory traces decay over time, or because independently stored associations compete with one another at the moment of recall. A third major cause operates at the point of recall itself: forgetting can also happen because the retrieval cues needed to access a memory are either missing altogether or are simply inappropriate for the memory being sought. Retrieval cues are aids that help a person recover information that is genuinely still stored in memory. This view was put forward by Tulving and his associates, who ran a series of experiments demonstrating that the contents of memory can become inaccessible purely because the cues available or used at the time of recall are absent or poorly matched to the material — not because the memory itself has been lost.

An example given in the chapter makes this concrete. Suppose a person memorises a list of meaningful words — such as hut, wasp, cottage, gold, bronze, and ant — where the words actually belong to six different categories (places people live in, names of insects, types of metal, and so on), though the category structure is never made explicit to the person memorising the list. If, after some time, the person is simply asked to recall the words with no further help, they may recall only a handful. But if, during a second recall attempt, they are additionally given the category names as prompts, their recall can become close to complete. In this example, the category names function as retrieval cues — they were not needed to store the information originally, but they dramatically improve access to it later. Beyond category labe …