Beneficial effects of selective item repetition on the recall of other items

•Selective retrieval of some studied items can improve recall of other items.•The effect arises with prolonged retention intervals between study and test.•It is larger after retrieval than restudy and when retrieval is demanding.•It is eliminated and even reversed when study context is mentally reinstated.•Results suggest that context reactivation processes mediate the effects.

Selective retrieval of some studied material can improve recall of the other material when access to study context at test is impaired, an effect that has been attributed to context reactivation processes (Bäuml and Samenieh, 2012). This study aimed at providing more direct evidence for this proposal by examining the influence of mental reinstatement of study context for the effects of selective retrieval. In addition, it was examined whether the induced beneficial effect generalizes from selective retrieval to selective restudy, and varies with retrieval difficulty, thus providing evidence on whether format of selective item repetition can influence context reactivation processes. In four experiments, prolonged retention intervals between study and selective item repetition were employed to impair study context access. Two main results emerged. First, mental reinstatement of the study context can eliminate, and even reverse, the beneficial effect of selective retrieval. Second, the size of the beneficial effect varies with repetition format, and is larger after selective retrieval than selective restudy, and larger when selective retrieval is demanding. These findings strengthen the view that context reactivation processes mediate the beneficial effects of selective item repetition. In particular, they indicate that the degree of repetition-induced context reactivation can vary with repetition format.