Where does retrieval collide?

The process by which information held in long-term memory is located and brought back into conscious awareness, guided by the cues present at the moment of remembering. Tulving and Thomson's 1973 Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory argued that access succeeds only when the cues available at the time of remembering match the way the item was first laid down, so remembering depends on the fit between how something was stored and the moment it is reached for. The referent is an internal cognitive act inside one person's own memory, distinct from searching a shared collection of documents for relevant files, or a parent animal carrying its stray young back to the nest.[1]

Unit

A single act of reaching one stored item, scored as produced or not

Recovery means

A failed access can succeed later when a better matching cue becomes available, as when a name on the tip of the tongue finally arrives

Measured by

Operationalised by free-recall and cued-recall accuracy, recognition performance, and the time taken to produce the item

The field and body of techniques for finding, within a large collection, the items (documents, web pages, images) that are relevant to a query, and ranking them by estimated relevance. Salton, Wong, and Yang's 1975 A vector space model for automatic indexing represented documents and queries as vectors of weighted terms so that relevance could be computed as a geometric closeness, a foundation for the search engines that followed. The referent is an engineered search over an external store holding many items, judged by precision and recall against a query, and it is neither the inner act of remembering nor an animal gathering its offspring.[2]

Unit

A ranked answer to one query over a fixed collection of items

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Evaluated by precision, recall, mean average precision, and related ranking scores against human relevance judgements

A stereotyped caregiving behavior in which a mother locates a displaced infant, takes it in her mouth, and carries it back to the nest, used as a reliable assay of maternal care in rodents. Marlin, Mitre, D'Amour, Chao, and Froemke's 2015 Oxytocin enables maternal behaviour by balancing cortical inhibition used this gathering behavior to show how the hormone oxytocin reshapes a mother's auditory cortex so that she responds to her pups' distress calls. The referent is an observable motor act of caregiving between animals, timed by how quickly and reliably a mother gathers her scattered young, and it has nothing in common with an inner memory process or a search over documents beyond the word.[3]

Unit

A single gathering act, one stray infant returned to the nest

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Scored by latency to gather, the fraction of scattered pups returned, and the reliability of the behavior across trials