State-dependent learning (state-dependent memory) is a notion that learning and recalling are based upon the physiological and mental state of the organism.
It has been very clearly demonstrated that things learned in one environment are best recalled when that environment is reinstated; and, moreover, this applies equally well to “internal” environments (or states) as it does to “external” environments.[1]
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A very clear description of state-dependent memory is found in John Elliotson's "Human Physiology" (1835):
" Dr. Abel informed me," says Mr. Combe (presummably George Combe), " of an Irish porter to a warehouse, who forgot, when sober, what he had done when drunk : but, being drunk, again recollected the transactions of his former state of intoxication. On one occasion, being drunk, he had lost a parcel of some value, and in his sober moments could give no account of it. Next time he was intoxicated, he recollected that he had left the parcel at a certain house, and there being no address on it, it had remained there safely, and was got on his calling for it. This man must have had two souls, one for his sober state, and one for him when drunk."
When investigating ways of training deep-sea divers to perform certain crucial underwater tasks, Godden and Baddeley (1975, 1980) clearly established that things learned underwater were best remembered in an underwater environment (and, as well, also established that things learned “on land” were best remembered “on land”).
They also clearly demonstrated that it was counter-productive to train people “on land” in activities and procedures that they would later exclusively perform underwater.
Goodwin et. al. (1969) and Overton (1968) clearly established that information gained in a drugged state may only be recalled when and if the individual's original internal “drugged” chemical environment had been reinstated.
Factors affecting state-dependent learning may include: environment, intoxication, emotional state, and sensory modality. An example of this effect is transfer-appropriate processing which is a strong positive effect on memory when the type of memorization and the type of recall are similar.
In neuropsychopharmacology, state-dependent learning denotes the fact that information that has been learned while the animal is under the influence of a certain drug ("state") can only be recalled and used to solve a task when the animal is in the same state in which the information was learned, but not in a different, i.e., undrugged state (Colpaert, 1990 [1] and Carlezone et al., 1995). (definition quoted from [2])
A recently identified type of context-dependent learning is the effect of language. Research by Marian et al. (2007) demonstrated that participants were more likely to identify an English answer to a question when asked in English and a Mandarin answer to a question when asked in Mandarin. This illustrates that the linguistic context of a memory may be encoded during learning.