The effect of divided attention on memory for items and their context

Memory for context, in comparison to memory for items, is a more demanding task and requires more attentional resources. We examined differences between item and context memory using divided attention at encoding and retrieval. Participants were presented with word lists and were instructed to learn the items (i.e., words), the intrinsic context (i.e., the colour of the cards on which each word was presented), and the extrinsic context (i.e., the temporal order of the words). Among 72 young adults, in comparison to conditions of full attention, divided attention applied at encoding only or retrieval only resulted in equally lower performance on all memory tasks; in contrast, divided attention applied at both encoding and retrieval resulted in lower performance only on memory for temporal order. The findings support the idea that memory for temporal order requires greater attentional resources and strategic processing than memory for items.