The pretesting effect under divided attention

Completing a pretest (e.g., star-?) before receiving correct-answer feedback (e.g., star-night) can improve long-term retention of the material compared to material that was initially only studied. The present study examined whether this pretesting effect requires attentional resources during the initial pretest stage and the subsequent feedback stage. Two experiments were conducted in which participants studied word pairs which were either presented in full for 12 s and thus could be studied immediately (study-only trials) or were first only presented with the cue word of a pair and asked to guess the target word for 6 s before the complete pair was shown for another 6 s (pretest trials). Critically, learning occurred either under full attention or under distraction by a secondary task, with the distraction occurring either during the first 6 s or the last 6 s of a trial. While results showed the typical pretesting effect in the absence of any distraction, the effect remained intact when distraction occurred during the first 6 s of a pretest trial, but was eliminated when distraction occurred during the last 6 s. This pattern of results arose when distraction induced material-general (Experiment 1) and when it induced material-specific (Experiment 2) interference. Consistently, additional analyses showed greater recall impairments for pretested pairs when distraction occurred during Stage 2 than during Stage 1, although such impairment was present in both situations. The findings align with theoretical accounts suggesting critical roles of attentional processes for the pretesting effect.