| dc.description.abstract | Remembering instead of restudying increases the long-term retention of previously learned information, a phenomenon often named testing effect. Studies using cued recall tasks suggest that this effect is preserved even when attentional resources are constrained during retrieval. However, free recall was not yet studied in this context. Therefore, in the present study we examine potential interactions between the testing effect and attention in a free recall task. For this purpose, 40 undergraduate students (18 to 35 years of age) were recruited. Ninety-six neutrally valenced words, with 4 to 9 letters, were assigned to four conditions (with two lists of 12 words each). Immediately after the presentation of each list, participants either (1) tried to remember all the words, or (2) reread all the words of the list. They performed each of these tasks under either divided or focused attention. To produce divided attention, a secondary task was included in which participants judged digits as even or odd. After a 24 hours interval, participants performed a free recall followed by a recognition task on all studied words. In the recall test, the testing effect was yielded when attention was divided, but not when attention was focused. This effect was not replicated in the late recognition test, however, wherein the only significant effect reflected greater performance for restudied than tested words when attention was focused. These results suggest that practicing retrieval protects learners from interferences, especially when they have to freely recall the to-be-learned contents | |
