The title of a song is on the tip of Gerard's tongue,but he cannot recall it until someone mentions the songwriter's name.Gerard's initial inability to recall the title was most likely caused by

A) encoding failure.
B) automatic processing.
C) retrieval failure.
D) repression.

Gerard's initial inability to recall the title of the song suggests that he experienced retrieval failure. This means that the information was stored in his memory, but he was temporarily unable to access it. The fact that he was able to recall the title when someone mentioned the songwriter's name suggests that a cue helped him retrieve the information from his memory. This is a common phenomenon known as the retrieval cue effect. Encoding failure and repression are not likely explanations since Gerard had previously encoded and stored the information in his memory. Automatic processing is not related to the issue of retrieval failure.