What Is Context-Dependent Memory Affect Learning?

Many different aspects of the learning and encoding of particular tasks and skills can affect the subsequent performance in these tasks. Specifically in the case of studying material in an educational context, building the scaffolding for strong retrieval pathways is imperative to proper learning and memorization of content. Manipulating the context of how one learns and is tested can be a powerful tool in strengthening the retrieval of studied material. Godden and Baddeley (1975) performed an experiment in which they manipulated the environmental context in which participants learned a list of words. The participants either learned on land or underwater, and were tested either on land or underwater. Their results showed that those that learned
When tested on the material, the students were either dressed in the same clothes or different clothes. Similar to the results of the Godden and Baddeley (1975) study, those students that were wearing the same clothes during studying and during testing showed a higher performance level. This study shows another contextual means by which learning was enhanced by the effects of encoding specificity. An experiment done by biochemists Buck and Axel (1991), sought to identify a large multigene family that is specific to odor recognition and perception. The discovery of this multigene family encoding odor receptors leads to the idea that the human olfactory system utilizes a far greater number of receptors than the visual system. Color vision, for example, accomplishes color discrimination using only three different photoreceptors (Rushton, 1955). The increased number of olfactory receptors utilized by the human sense of smell indicates that it is a novel sense and could be a very powerful retrieval