Orienting selective attention within long-term contextual memories

Selective attention is central to long-term memory retrieval, yet how attention selects and prioritizes relevant memory contents remains underexplored. Still needed is a well-controlled experimental framework to isolate and systematically manipulate attention orienting in long-term memory. The current study addresses this gap. Building on retrocue designs from working-memory research, we introduce procedures to investigate how selective attention operates within contextual long-term memory. Across three experiments (n = 235), participants learned associations between scenes and the identities and locations of two objects. In a subsequent Selective Retrieval task, participants viewed the studied scenes and later identified scene-associated objects from an array. Spatial cues directed internal attention to the learned location of the relevant object to be probed or neutral cues offered no spatial information. Informative cues yielded significant benefits and costs relative to neutral cues. Benefits emerged regardless of whether cues appeared before or after scene presentation and were equivalent across short and long retrieval intervals, suggesting attention may operate directly during long-term retrieval memory without requiring working-memory mediation. This approach offers a flexible method for isolating and manipulating attention functions in long-term memory, enabling future investigation of the psychological and neural mechanisms governing selective memory access.