Encoding Specificity Principle

The encoding specificity principle is the general finding that a person's ability to retrieve an episodic memory improves when the context present at the moment of recall matches the context that was present when the memory was originally encoded. The psychologists Endel Tulving and Donald Thomson introduced the concept from recognition-memory experiments, proposing that contextual information becomes encoded together with the content of a memory and later affects how well that memory can be retrieved. The principle operates through retrieval cues: because the same piece of information can be encoded differently depending on the surrounding context at the time, later access to it is governed by how well the cues present during an attempted recall match the encoding context, which can include the physical location, the surrounding sounds, and a person's own mental or physical state at the time of learning. The encoding specificity principle underlies two well known related effects, context-dependent memory, in which recall is aided by matching external, environmental context, and state-dependent memory, in which recall is aided by matching a person's internal state, such as mood or level of intoxication, and it has substantial implications for how studying and learning conditions are structured to support later recall.