Similarities/differences between the conditions of encoding and retrieval can affect retrieval performance.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- Context dependance of self-categories (social vs. personal identification)
- Priming effect
- Intuitive understanding of sampling effects (especially among statisticians)
- state-dependent learning

Psychological appearances of domain specificity

information is encoded with considerations to  the context it was presented in.

encoding specificity

Goldstein, E. B. (2014). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience. Nelson Education.


Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience

Self categories are not fixed - individuals can toggle through self-categories based on their needs and relevance to a present situation.  Self-categories are flexible as to allow the individual to adapt to the social context.

Context dependance of self-categories

When a sensory experience (hearing a word/phrase, or seeing a picture), triggers an associational response that effects your decision making afterwards. The presentation of some stimuli affects someones response to the presentation of a following one.

Priming effect

Kahneman and Tversky in 1971, conducted a study to assess the intuitive understanding of sampling affects among statisticians. After asking the statisticians:
- There are two hospitals, one large and one small. 60% of the babies born in one of the hospitals on a specific day happened to be a boy. Which hospital was it likely to be?

During a causal conversation, most statisticians answered wrong and chose the large hospital. This is despite the fact a basic idea in statistics is that small sample sizes are likely to be variable. The context the idea was expressed in caused errors among "experts" in the discipline.

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