Trade-offs between remembering and online evaluation in retrospective evaluation

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 specialised strategies even where a memory-based strategy would be effective overall.