The role of sensory attributes as retrieval cues or as interference in retrieval of information from episodic memory

The sensoty attributes of to-be-remembered (TBR) events and of distractor stimuli were systematically manipulated (both within and between modalities) in two Brown-Peterson tasks [experiments 1 (N = 40 male and female university students or faculty) and 2 (N - 22 male and female undergraduates)] and in a delayed recognition task (Experiment 1). Performance on these recall and recognition tasks (in which the semantic attributes of the TBR events were relatively controlled) was consistent with episodic theory. Memory of an event was reasonably completely described in terms of (a) the degree of overlap between the perceptible properties of the retrieval environment and of the memory trace of the event and (b) the perceptible similarities between the memory trace of the event and the traces of information encoded temporally adjacent to it. These sensory encoding specificity effects (as well as other research reviewed) were interpreted as demonstrations that a semantic interpretation of the encoding specificity principle cannot account for all encoding specificity phenomena.