Cognitive psychology’s approach to the study of mental processing was largely based on the notion of information storage and recall, and the connection between them. Endel Tulving demonstrated how memories can be categorized by our minds into different stores and can be retrieved by ‘jogging’ the memory with cues.
He also described remembering (and forgetting) as a form of “mental time travel”, taking us back to a time and circumstance when memory was stored. This concept was taken up by British psychologists Alan Baddeley and Gordon H. Bower, who demonstrated that people remembered things better in the conditions in which they learned. They found that our memories are not merely cue dependent, but also mood dependent—our feelings when storing and retrieving them affect their recall. For example, if someone is feeling sad, it is harder for him to remember happy experiences; likewise, if someone is feeling angry, he can remember happier moments much more easily. In addition, Gordon H. Bower found that our minds often store memories in such a way that they are not only cue-dependent but also mood-dependent. The memories are then retrieved when the person feels an emotion similar to the one that occurred during the original experience.
