When Professor Siegel walks into his class, he greets several of his students by name, remembering them all and immediately reca
lling how well (or poorly) they are doing in his class. When he runs into one of those same students in the supermarket over the weekend, however, he struggles to remember her name. This is probably best explained by __________.
The forgetfulness of the professor can best be explained by cue-dependent forgetting. Cue-dependent forgetting is the failure to recall information when we do not have cues that give us "clues." Most of the time, these cues are context-dependent, like in the case of the professor. Without the "cue" of the academic context, he was unable to retrieve the information necessary to remember the student's name.
