Cues- are things that serve as a reminder. They may meaningfully link to the material to be remembered or may not be meaningfully linked, such as environmental cues (a room) or cues related to your mental state (being or sad or drunk).

Retrieval failure- occurs due to the absence of cues. An explanation for forgetting based on the idea that the issue relates to being able to retrieve a memory that there is there (available) but not accessible. Retrieval depends on using cues.

Tulving and Pearlstone demonstrated the value the retrieval cues in a study where ppts had to learn 48 words belonging to 12 categories.

Ppts either had to recall as many words as they could or they were given cues in the form of the category name.

In the free condition 40% of words were recalled on average,, whereas in the cued-recall condition recalled 60% of the words

Whenever information is learned, we also often remember where we are or how we felt.

Abernathy arranged a group of students to be tested before a certain course began.

There was slight changes when the test took place like a different instructor and changed some of he results of the students

Goodwin et al. asked male volunteers to remember a list of words when they were either drunk or sober. The ppts were asked to recall the lists after 24 hours when some were sober but others had to get drunk again.

The recall stores are suggesting that information learned when drunk is more available when in the same state later.