The re-encoding processes of restudy and testing are equally susceptible to the impairment of divided attention

Authors

Jian Zhu*, Alicia Olechowski, Reza Habib

Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois, United States of America

Abstract

After an initial study of a set of items, an intervening test of those items results in superior final memory compared with restudying those items prior to the final test. This phenomenon has been termed the testing effect. The primary purpose of the present study was to juxtapose restudy and testing in order to assess, from an attention perspective, whether the re-encoding process occurring during testing (that contributes to a superior subsequent memory, i.e., testing effect) is different from the re-encoding process during the restudy. To this end, we adopted a concurrent task to divide attention during restudy and testing. In Experiment 1, we confirmed the mnemonic impairment of divided attention during both restudy and testing on the final test. In Experiment 2, we ruled out the confounding possibility of allocation of attention between the concurrent and memory tasks by finding that allocation of attention did not affect the impairment of divided attention on final test performance. Together, our data suggest that the re-encoding component of testing is similar to the re-encoding during restudy in terms of attentional demands. The consistency of our findings with other existing theoretical accounts of testing effect and one potential methodological difference amongst the reported studies in the literature that found mixed results were discussed.

Keywords: memory, attention, divided attention, testing effect, retrieval practice

Pages: 65-84

doi:10.24193/cbb.2017.21.05

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