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Numerous studies from the past five decades have shown that selective retrieval of some studied items can impair recall of other items. This chapter reviews more recent work, in which it is demonstrated that selective memory retrieval has two faces and that it can both impair and improve recall of other items. In this recent work, participants' access to study context during selective retrieval was experimentally manipulated and it was examined whether such manipulation influences the effects of selective retrieval. Access to study context was manipulated using listwise directed forgetting, context-dependent forgetting and time-dependent forgetting. The results consistently showed that selective retrieval impairs recall of other memories if access to study context during retrieval is largely maintained, but that selective retrieval can improve recall if study context access is impaired. The findings are explained by a two-factor account, which claims that, in general, selective retrieval does not only trigger inhibition and blocking but also triggers context reactivation processes. The proposal is that primarily inhibition and blocking operate when study context access during selective retrieval is largely maintained, whereas primarily context reactivation processes operate when study context access is impaired. Current findings on the two faces of selective retrieval are well consistent with this theoretical view.
Selective retrieval of some studied items can both impair and improve recall of the other items. This study examined the role of working memory capacity (WMC) for the two effects of memory retrieval. Participants studied an item list consisting of predefined target and nontarget items. After study of the list, half of the participants performed an imagination task supposed to induce a change in mental context, whereas the other half performed a counting task which does not induce such context change. Following presentation of a second list, memory for the original list's target items was tested, either with or without preceding retrieval of the list's nontarget items. Consistent with previous work, preceding nontarget retrieval impaired target recall in the absence of the context change, but improved target recall in its presence. In particular, there was a positive relationship between WMC and the beneficial, but not the detrimental effect of memory retrieval. On the basis of the view that the beneficial effect of memory retrieval reflects context-reactivation processes, the results indicate that individuals with higher WMC are better able to capitalise on retrieval-induced context reactivation than individuals with lower WMC.