A strange occurrence often happens that baffles many. The episode of lost keys. Everyone has had the experience of walking from one room to another to retrieve a set of keys. And when you enter the room you have forgotten what you were going to get. You stand there pacing for a few minutes, then decide to exit towards the room you were previously in. By the time you enter the first room, a flash triggers and you remember once again what you were going to get. And you say, "Ugh...the keys!" This has been a scenario among many people, no matter how responsible one is. Although we are not certain of the primary reason for this aspect of the human memory, some research has caught our attention to a few possibilities which we will discuss here in our briefing.

The article entitled, "Very Rapid Forgetting" dealt with the ability to remember specific items, during a given time, without forgetting. In this article there were three experiments. These experiments tested subjects on the number of items recalled after a set distraction. Each distraction was of a different nature, possibly nonverbal or verbal. The experimenter concluded that there was "no fixed rate of forgetting." They also found that the nature of the verbal or nonverbal distraction may be irrelevant to the rate of forgetting."

Back to the scenario of the car keys. Something, upon leaving the first room, may trigger in your mind while walking to the next room. This may become a distraction. For example, if one is leaving the first room and hears music, a nearby door slam, or a yell from downstairs, they may find themselves thinking of that occurrence, forgetting their initial goal, which was to retrieve the keys. The distraction was a startling interruption. This distraction caused one to forget. After returning to the first room, you may see or hear something that may help you remember what the item was. This scenario leads us to better understand "encoding specificity."

Encoding Specificity is the "hypothesized phenomenon of memory in which the specific way of representing information as it is placed into memory affects the specific way in which the information may be retrieved later." According to the scenario, the thought to look for the keys occurred in the first room. The information was encoded into memory there. So upon returning to the room, after forgetting, the visual cues of the room may have allowed you to retrieve the forgotten information. Information went into the memory in the first room and was retrieved from the memory in that same room.
 
 

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