Cognition The Thinking Animal

In the previous chapter we considered the process of encoding, emphasizing that it is not accurate to characterize it as the intentional act of learning; rather, it is how experience becomes memory, depending on certain features of our thought at the time. In this chapter, we describe retrieval, the process of bringing a long-term memory back to consciousness. We consider what makes successful retrieval possible and also what might make it unreliable. In many situations, we know we have experienced something (we had a chance to encode it), but when we later have reason to retrieve it, we cannot access the memory.