Cue-dependent forgetting (context effect)

Biological Parallel

Salmon return to spawn in the exact stream where they hatched—environmental cues trigger memory retrieval better than conscious recall alone. Memory encoding weaves contextual details (location, mood, sounds) into the trace because context predicts which patterns will be useful when. Cue-dependent forgetting isn't failure; it's context-specific storage where the brain indexes memories by retrieval situation, not universal access.