Cues that work best to evoke retrieval are those that recreate the event or name to be remembered and sometimes the target itself. However, sometimes these cues do not work and people are unsuccessful in identifying the correct answer. For example, if I am trying to cue someone to think of their home-phone, I might give the cue "phone". However, this could also prompt the individual to recall words like work-phone or cell-phone, thus failing to recall home-phone. Which phenomenon describes this failure?
