Using the Power of Context and Specificity

Another way to increase your encoding ability is to incorporate the
specific context, and then use that context when you seek to retrieve
that memory.11 A good example of how the power of context works
is when you meet someone at an event and later you run into that
person dressed differently on the street. You may not even recognize
the person or you may only have a vague sense of familiarity—you
think you may have seen that person before but you don’t have the
slightest idea where. But if the other person has a better memory for
your meeting and mentions where you met, the memory of who that
person is may come flooding back. Why? Because you now have the
context for your meeting, which cues you in to who this person is
and what transpired in your meeting.
A similar kind of experience may occur when you go to get something
from another room but once you get there, you don’t have any
idea why you are there. No, you are not suffering the early stages of
Alzheimer’s disease. You have simply moved out of the context in
which you encoded the item and remembered why you need it. In a
different context, you don’t remember what you were looking for.
But once you return to the original room, you will remember.
Psychologists have developed some terms that highlight the importance
of context for remembering. One is the ‘‘encoding specificity
principle,’’ which means that you will better recall something if
you are in a context that’s similar to where you encoded the information—
that is, when you entered it into your long-term memory.12 By
contrast, you are more likely to forget when you experience a different
context. Two other terms that psychologists use to refer to this
phenomenon are that your memory is ‘‘context-dependent’’ or that
‘‘transfer-appropriate processing’’ helps you better remember.13 In
other words, if you are having trouble remembering something, it
can help to go back into the setting where you first encoded it into
memory. Or if you can’t actually go there, you can mentally project
yourself into that setting—one of the techniques I’ll discuss further
in Chapters 24 and 26.
Repeatedly, psychologists have found examples of this encoding
specificity principle in their research, in which memory is dependent
on the context where the original memory is encoded. For example,
they found that people hearing a male or female speak some words
were more likely to remember the word when they heard the words
spoken again by someone of the same sex.14 They have also found
that subjects will recall an earlier experience in extensive detail
when triggered by a present-day stimulus that evokes that experience.
For example, an image of an exotic bird you haven’t seen in
years brings back memories of going on a birding trip to the tropics.
While the physical context can serve as a reminder, so can the
mental context, because it’s not just how the environment looks but
how it feels.15 For example, you may experience an extremely hot
day in one place that brings up memories of how you felt when it
was extremely hot someplace else; a bitter cold day now can bring
up memories of a bitter cold winter long ago.