Waking rest during retention facilitates memory consolidation, but so does social media use.

ABSTRACT: A short period of post-encoding waking rest has been shown to benefit subsequent memory performance. For example, past research suggests that waking rest after learning Icelandic-German word pairs boosts subsequent recall relative to an equally long period of social media use. Such findings are typically interpreted as evidence in favor of diversion retroactive interference. According to this account, non-specific cognitive processing inhibits consolidation and thus impairs storage of information encoded previously. However, the effect might alternatively be explained by similarity retroactive interference according to which retrieval is hampered by information processed during retention. Here, we report two experiments that shed light on the mechanisms underlying the waking rest effect. I

SUBMITTER: Quevedo Putter J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11836141 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature