Some Tests of the Encoding Specificity and Semantic Integration Hypotheses

The encoding specificity hypothesis of Thomson and Tulving, as stated in 1970, holds that only those cues that have been present at encoding will be effective retrieval cues. In each of eight experiments, recall was generally best when the retrieval context matched the encoding context, thus supporting the hypothesis. The hypothesis was not supported, however, in several experiments in which, under a wide range of conditions, recall was better when strong extralist retrieval cues were present than when no retrieval cues (Experiments 2-7) or when weak extralist cues were present at retrieval (Experiment 8). These results were, however, accommodated by Tulving and Thomson's encoding specificity principle of 1973 combined with the assumption that the strong cues present at retrieval were also present at encoding. Finally, results from several of these experiments indicated, contrary to Baker and Santa's semantic integration hypothesis, that the facilitation of recall deriving from the presence at retrieval of strong extralist cues was independent of the degree to which a target word and its cue word were integrated.