Find over 25,000 psychological definitions


encoding specificity

the principle that retrieval of memory is optimal when the retrieval conditions (such as context or cues) duplicate the conditions that were present when the memory was formed. [proposed in 1983 by Endel Tulving]

Browse dictionary by letter

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Psychology term of the day

February 28th 2025

common metric

common metric

a unit or scale of measurement that is applied to data from different sources. In a meta-analysis, for instance, the results from multiple studies may need to be placed on a common metric so that they may be meaningfully compared.