[1] It was introduced by Thomson and Tulving who suggested that contextual information is encoded with memories which affect the retrieval process.
[2] A series of psychological experiments were undertaken in the 1970s which continued this work and further showed that context affects our ability to recall information.
Ebbinghaus, a pioneer of research into memory, noted that associations between items aids recall of information thus the internal context of a list matters.
[7] Modeled after Table 1 Bahrick[7] (1970) Multiple studies have shown a dependence on context of one's environment as an aid to recall specific items and events.
[8] In an experiment by Godden and Baddeley in 1975, researchers took two groups of individuals and asked them to study and remember a list of given words.
This experiment illustrates how recreating the physical environment of encoding can aid in the retrieval process.
In the study 39 participants were asked to read through an article one time, knowing that they would take a short test on the material.
Second, this phenomenon may be due to the general language-created ambiance of the situation in which participants were tested rather than the specific associations to individual cue words.
Patients with AD, however, were unable to benefit from the weakly related cue even if it was present at both encoding and retrieval.
[14] Instead of relying upon semantic encoding, those with AD presented their most dominant associations to the cue words during recall test.
This type of state-dependent effect is strongest with free recall rather than when strong retrieval cues are present.
[17] This principle demonstrates the significance of encoding specificity; the contextual state of intoxication provides retrieval cues and information that are superior to and outweigh the negative effects on memory from a depressant substance that activates GABA and inhibits neurotransmission.
A political advertisement[19] from Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign is inherently emotional in nature and therefore very easily remembered.
[21] James S. Nairne of Purdue University is the primary opponent of Thomson and Tulving's encoding specificity principle.
[12] He argues that the encoding-retrieval match is correlational rather than causal and states that many cognitive psychologists consider the principle to be "sacrosanct".
[22] He characterizes memory as an "active process of discrimination"[22] and proposes that we use cues to choose between several retrieval candidates.
[22] Phillip Higham has also criticised the design and interpretation of Thomson and Tulving's original experiments which used strong and weak cues to generate the encoding specificity principle.
[23] In 1975 Leo Postman conducted experiments on the encoding specificity principle to check the generalisability of the concept.