Godden and Baddeley's Context-Dependent Memory Experiment

In 1975 Duncan Godden and Alan Baddeley published a study of context-dependent memory using eighteen recreational divers, who each learned a list of thirty-six unrelated two- or three-syllable words either on dry land or several meters underwater, and were then tested for recall in either the same or a different environment from where they had learned the words. The study found a clear interaction between learning and testing environment: divers who learned words underwater recalled them better when tested underwater than when tested on land, and divers who learned words on land recalled them better on land than underwater, regardless of which environment was objectively more comfortable or familiar. Godden and Baddeley interpreted the result as evidence that the physical surroundings present during learning become encoded as part of the memory itself and later serve as retrieval cues, a phenomenon they termed context-dependent memory. The diving experiment became one of the most widely cited real-world demonstrations of context effects on memory, though later replication attempts have produced more mixed results than the original study reported.