Abstract
The role of attention in long-term memory (LTM) encoding is well-established in the literature, but results regarding the effect of attention during LTM retrieval are inconclusive. One possibility is that divided attention disrupts the precision and not the accessibility of memoranda. If so, inconsistent findings in the literature can be attributed to differences across tasks in their need for high precision representations. We used a continuous report paradigm to test the effects of divided attention on accessibility and precision of retrieved memory representations for the first time in the literature to our knowledge. In the learning phase of each block, participants (N=15) studied objects in varying orientations shown at the center of the screen. In the test phase, participants retrieved these objects either under no distraction or while also completing a secondary visual task that involved finding a red star among competing objects. Participants were asked to retrieve the tested object’s orientation by rotating it using a mouse. Dividing attention with a secondary task at retrieval resulted in a higher error rate. A mixture model fit on error distribution was used to estimate guess rate and precision. Participants were more likely to guess under divided attention. However, no difference between conditions was observed for precision. These results suggest that dividing attention during retrieval reduces the accessibility of memoranda with minimal impact on their precision.