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This research seeks to understand the balance between memory recall and evaluation tasks in retrospective judgments.

August 2, 2026Open Access

Trade-offs between remembering and online evaluation in retrospective evaluation

AMAlice MasonUniversity of Bath GWGeoff WardUniversity of Essex GBGordon D. A. BrownUniversity of Warwick

Key Points

This research seeks to understand the balance between memory recall and evaluation tasks in retrospective judgments.
Two experiments with 139 and 262 participants, respectively.
Participants viewed numerical sequences representing monetary values and engaged in recall or evaluation tasks.
Task expectancy was manipulated through pre-cueing and post-cueing methods.
In dual-task conditions, performance in either recall or evaluation decreased, indicating dual-task costs.
Simulations suggested better performance could have occurred if participants focused solely on memory encoding.
Findings indicate inefficient allocation of cognitive resources between competing processes during evaluations.

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines the trade-off between remembering and online evaluation in retrospective judgments. In two experiments, we compared conditions where participants performed only one task (evaluation or recall) versus both tasks, with task expectancy manipulated through pre-cueing or post-cueing. Participants ( N =139 and N =262) viewed sequences of numbers representing monetary values and were asked to either recall the numbers or evaluate the sequence through willingness-to-pay judgments. Results showed that when both tasks were potential (Experiment 1) or actual (Experiment 2) candidates to be cued, one or the other task showed a decrement in performance, indicative of some dual-task cost. Strikingly, simulations revealed that participants would have performed better had they focused solely on memory encoding during presentation rather than attempting dual-task processing. These findings suggest that people do not optimally allocate cognitive resources between competing processes during retrospective evaluation, and may attempt to deploy multiple specialized strategies even where a memory-based strategy would be effective overall.

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