Divided attention at encoding and retrieval for once- and thrice-presented items: A micro-level analysis of attentional costs

Several recent studies have indicated that retrieval, unlike encoding, is only minimally affected by dividing attention, but is associated with significant secondary task costs. The reported experiment further investigated the effects of divided attention at encoding and retrieval on recall by manipulating the number of presentations of word pairs and using a cued-recall paradigm and a multimeasure approach. This allowed the assessment of accuracy and latency of retrievals of once- and thrice-presented items, as well as of overall attentional costs and the temporal distribution of attentional costs incurred by these retrievals. The results obtained show that providing episodic enhancement to the cue–target relationships, by presenting word pairs three times during the study phase, increases both the probability of retrieval success and the speed of the retrieval. In addition, repetition leads to retrieval which requires less attentional resources. In particular, repeated items require fewer attentional resources during the cue-elaboration/search component. This effect seems to be mediated by a change in the nature of retrievals of the thrice-presented pairs, which seem to mostly bypass the search process, making it faster and less dependent on attentional resources.