Ironically, the presentation of a subset of studied material as retrieval cues at test often impairs recall of the remaining (target) material—an effect known as part-list cuing impairment. Part-list cues are typically provided at the beginning of the recall period, a time when nearly all individuals would be able to recall at least some studied items on their own. Across two experiments, we examined the effects of part-list cuing when student participants could decide on their own when the cues were presented during the recall period. Results showed that participants activated the cues relatively late in the recall period, when recall was already close to asymptote. Critically, such delayed cuing no longer impaired recall performance. The detrimental effect of part-list cuing, as it has been demonstrated numerous times in the memory literature, thus seems to depend on presentating the cue items (too) early in the recall period.

具有讽刺意味的是，在测试中将研究材料的子集呈现为检索线索通常会损害对剩余（目标）材料的回忆——这种效应被称为部分列表提示障碍。部分列表提示通常在回忆期开始时提供，此时几乎所有的人都能够自己回忆起至少一些研究过的项目。在两个实验中，当学生参与者可以自己决定在回忆期间出现提示时，我们检查了部分列表提示的影响。结果表明，参与者在回忆期间相对较晚地激活线索，此时回忆已经接近渐近线。至关重要的是，这种延迟提示不再损害回忆表现。部分列表提示的不利影响，正如它在记忆文献中多次证明的那样，