encoding specificity

n. The idea that human memory performs best when the conditions of remembering are the same as the conditions at the time when the memory was formed. The supposition is that any memory has many associations, and the more of these associations there are at the time of recall, the more likely it is that the information will be recalled. As an example, it has been found that students given a final exam in the same room in which they had a class get better scores on a test than students from the same class who take the test in a different room.