Fig. 1 |. Tulving and Pearlstone’s experiment on retrieval failure¹.

Subjects were presented with a series of words. These words were drawn from multiple categories (for example, types of birds, flowers, etc.). In the test phase, subjects were asked to recall as many words as they could from the list (free recall) or from the specific categories (cued recall). The cued recall group performed considerably better than the free recall group across categories, indicating that retrieval cues present at the time of recall determine engram accessibility and subsequent success at remembering.