Completing a pretest (e.g., frog – ?) before receiving feedback on the correct answer (e.g., frog – pond) can improve long-term retention of the material compared to material that was initially only studied. The present study examined whether this pretesting effect requires attentional resources during the initial pretest phase or the subsequent feedback phase. To this end, participants studied word pairs (e.g., frog – pond) which were either presented in full for 12 s and thus could be studied immediately (study-only trials) or were first only presented with the cue word of a pair and asked to guess the target word (e.g., frog – ?) for 6 s before the complete pair was shown for another 6 s (pretest trials). Critically, the study-only and pretest trials took place either under full attention or under distraction by a secondary task, with the distraction occurring either only during the first 6 s or the last 6 s of a trial. While results showed a typical pretesting effect in the absence of any distraction, the pretesting effect remained intact when distraction occurred during the first 6 s of a pretest trial but was eliminated when distraction occurred during the last 6 s. The findings suggest that atttentional processes can play a critical role for the pretesting effect, though primarily during the feedback phase of a learning trial. The implications of these findings for prominent accounts of the pretesting effect, such as elaboration and attentional accounts, are discussed.