“…The present results may also speak to the broader principle of desirable difficulty, according to which remembering benefits from processing difficulty at the time of encoding (Bjork, 1994). A wide variety of results support this principle, with memory benefits observed for processing difficulty induced by pattern masking (e.g., Hirshman & Mulligan, 1991; Nairne, 1988), difficult-to-read fonts (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011), and perceptual blurring 2 (Rosner, Davis, & Milliken, 2015). More accurate recognition for incongruent than for congruent items (Krebs et al, 2013; Rosner et al, 2014), as well as for hard-selection than for easy-selection items (Experiment 1 of the present study), also fits with the desirable difficulty principle.…”