Retrieval Cues can be described as a type of stimuli used to summon information from our memory. There are many forms of retrieval cues such as location, a smell, or a song (Goldstein, 2015). An example of a song serving as a retrieval cue can be a Wedding song dedicated to a bride and groom. Hearing that song will likely bring back similar feelings, thoughts, and events that took place on that very day. This is a specific situation which happened to me and my family the other day.
Myself, my mom, and my stepdad were rooting around in the attic at an attempt to locate the Halloween decorations (procrastination- I know). We were listening to my playlist on shuffle when their Wedding song, One Man Band by Old Dominion, started playing. For perspective, we can think of the song as an assistant when it comes to retrieval of the memory. Specifically in this case, One Man Band acted as my retrieval cue for the memory of my moms wedding. The song had no significance to me before this memory. Now when I hear it I’m reminded of the day where we got dressed up to celebrate the union of my parents and the grand emotion I felt that day. I remember the emotion and the tears, the smiles and laughs. It wasn’t my wedding, but I was still in attendance and there are a list of reasons why the memory is special to me as well which is why the song made me think of the event.
Had we not heard the song, another example of a retrieval cue of the wedding could have been the smell of the sea salt on our shells and sand we brought back with us. We could have smelled them and been reminded about the salty air during the reception. In a few years we have a scheduled trip to revisit the same beach they got married on. This would be an example of returning to the location where the original memory was formed. Retrieval cues can be provided to us in a number of different formats and be extremely helpful in memory retrieval.
I really enjoyed your post on retrieval cues and how your family was able to remember a wonderful day by hearing that song. I was just home for the weekend visiting my parents and my sister and we got looking through old photo albums my mom has. My sister and I found pictures from when we were in Japan. At that time I was roughly 7 years old and my sister was 4 years old. After we found those pictures we were able to retrieve more memories from that trip and got off talking about our time there for like two hours! By looking at just a few pictures, the memories of our time from Japan came flooding back. It felt as if we were just there and these memories happened nearly 20 years ago. The process of retrieval is extremely important because many of our failures of memory are failures of retrieval—the information is “in there,” but we can’t get it out (Goldstein 2105). Retrieval cues are almost like giving our memory a hint to help remember a certain event. If you did not hear the song from your parents wedding day you never would have just randomly thought about that day. As soon as you heard that song, it gave you a hint to those memories you had.
Goldstein, E. B. (2015). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience. Cengage Learning.
Good Morning,
I really enjoyed reading your blog post this week and especially your thoughts on how sensory stimulation, especially that of scent, can act as a retrieval cue for an autobiographical memory. If not an autobiographical, paired with both episodic and semantic, at the very least an episodic memory of your own personal experiences and emotions. This concept has always intrigued me as I think most of us have experienced smelling a particular scent and are then flooded with an intense memory.
In exploring this topic, I came across a new term, The Proust Phenomenon, named after the French writer Marcel Proust to “describe the way in which odors can vividly trigger autobiographical experiences” (Cuffari, 2021). This information provided a name for the “phenomenon”, but I was still curious as to why scent could evoke such powerful memories. Cuffari explains in her article that this is due to the direct pathway that olfactory information, unlike visual or auditory information first having to pass through the thalamus, has to the amygdala portion of our brain (Cuffari, 2021). The amygdala, as we learned from our textbook, is the portion of the brain that aids in emotional memories.
You also mentioned that you were able to recall your parent’s wedding day clearly even though it wasn’t your own. This seems to fit with the cultural life script hypothesis, in that, weddings our so engrained as important parts of our life and culture that they are easier to remember. Even when major events like milestone birthdays, anniversaries, or weddings aren’t our own we often have clear episodic memories of them especially to those related to people close to us.
Great post!
Works Cited
Cuffari, B. (2021, January 7). How are Smell and Memory Connected? Retrieved from News-Medical.net website: https://www.news-medical.net/health/How-are-Smell-and-Memory-Connected.aspx