Encoding specificity in interpersonal communication.

The article reports two experiments that assess the adequacy of some people's encodings as cues for other people's semantic retrieval. The central finding is of encoding specificity. That is, encodings dedicated to some discriminative purpose are less effective for discriminations that are either more precise or more general than the intended one. The theoretical focus of the article regards parallels between episodic memory and interpersonal communication. An effective communication is one that transfers well from the initial encoding context to the discriminative context in which the message is received. An effective memory encoding is one that transfers well from the study context to the retrieval environment. Thus transfer-appropriate processing benefits both sorts of task relative to transfer-inappropriate processing, and the characteristics that determine the appropriateness of processing are importantly similar in memory and communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)