During class Wayne is busy texting on his cell phone and not paying attention in class. The teacher gives a quiz on the material from that class. Wayne can't retrieve the information from that class and does poorly on the quiz. A likely factor in Wayne's inability to retrieve the information is:

A likely factor in Wayne's not being able to retrieve the information is encoding failure.

Encoding in general refers to the ability of the brain to store and retrieve data or memories.

Encoding Failure is a term used to describe the occasional failure of the brain to create a memory link.

When this encoding failure occurs, the brain is prevented from its ability of storing or retrieving any data.

His cellular distraction.