How Do Cognitive Resources Modulate Recall in Interleaved Tasks?

The use of interleaving as a form of contextual variation can enhance, impair, or have no effect on memory. We hypothesise that this variability is due to task demands interacting with the amount of available cognitive resources an individual can mobilise. Using two memory interleaving task paradigms, desirable difficulties and the complex span, we thoroughly evaluated how several well-established cognitive resource theories predict, are consistent with, or are challenged by the spectrum of memory findings. Resources as attentional-control mechanisms, the interference account, and continuous storage accounted best for the set of findings. However, these theoretical perspectives were only able to offer adequate explanations when combined with one or more other theories, suggesting that processing- and storage-capacity based theories characterise the dynamics of cognitive resources at different stages of memory processes. Future work should focus on the quantification of cognitive resources to improve the predictive power of these theories.