Two ways of information retrieval are recognition and recall.
Recognition is a process where certain studied information is identified within a group of items.
One theory, the spreading activation theory, has been one accepted explanation of information retrieval. A cue word, which is used to prompt another word, can activate a node, which is a connection between the cue word in the target word. A target word is the word that the cue word prompts. The retrieval theory assumes that stronger word pairs are the result of immediate images chosen over other available images in the memory, much like free association. Both spreading activation theory and the retrieval theory discuss strength of the connections between word pairs.