Abstract
Evidence exists that a brief period of wakeful rest after learning can support the retention of memories, whereas a period filled with a cognitive task after learning can weaken the retention of memories. The present study in 10–13 year old children investigated whether wakeful resting after encoding is more beneficial for the retention of new verbal information than watching movies, which reflects a common everyday life/learning break activity in children at this age. Children encoded a word list. After immediate recall of this word list, they wakefully rested for 12 min. Next, children encoded another word list. After immediate recall of this word list, they watched animated short movies for 12 min. The order of the delay conditions (rest, movies) was counterbalanced across children. At the end of the experimental session, a surprise free recall test took place. Overall analyses revealed that while memory performance decreased over time in both the resting condition and movies condition, it decreased significantly more in the movies condition. These results indicate that wakeful resting supports the retention of verbal information in children aged 10–13 years.
Highlights
Studies indicate that memory retention can be significantly affected by the activity directly after learning (e.g. Dewar et al 2012, 2007; Craig et al 2015; Mercer 2015; Brokaw et al 2016)
Already Bigham (1894) found that younger adults showed less forgetting when the interval between learning and recall was ‘unfilled’ compared to processing a cognitively demanding distractor task. This view was extended by Müller and Pilzecker (1900) showing in adults that a shorter temporal separation between two learned word lists led to a lower recall performance for the first word list
Order of the delay conditions was counterbalanced across children, i.e. word list 1 was followed by resting and word list 2 was followed by movies for half of the children, whereas word list 1 was followed by movies and word list 2 was followed by resting for the other half
Summary
Studies indicate that memory retention can be significantly affected by the activity directly after learning (e.g. Dewar et al 2012, 2007; Craig et al 2015; Mercer 2015; Brokaw et al 2016). Already Bigham (1894) found that younger adults showed less forgetting when the interval between learning and recall was ‘unfilled’ compared to processing a cognitively demanding distractor task. This view was extended by Müller and Pilzecker (1900) showing in adults that a shorter temporal separation between two learned word lists led to a lower recall performance for the first word list. Neuroscientific evidence exists that task-relevant brain areas stay active during post-encoding wakeful rest These studies showed that activity and connectivity of those brain areas, which were involved during learning, predicted (interindividual differences in) subsequent memory performance It is assumed that during periods of wakeful rest recent events are neurally ‘replayed’ (Deuker et al 2013; Staresina et al 2013; Dudai et al 2015; Peigneux et al 2006; Schapiro et al 2018), which helps memories to get consolidated, i.e. to be transformed into longerlasting, more stable memories less prone to interference (Robertson 2012; Deuker et al 2013)
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