Effects of prestudy and poststudy rest on memory: Support for temporal interference accounts of forgetting.

Abstract

According to interference-based theories of memory, including temporal-distinctiveness theory, both prestudy and poststudy rest should have beneficial impacts on memory performance. Specifically, higher temporal isolation of a memorandum should reduce proactive and/or retroactive interference, and thus should result in better recall. In the present study, we investigated the effects of prestudy and poststudy rest in a free recall paradigm. Participants studied three lists of words, separated by either a short or a long period of low mental activity (a tone-detection task). Recall targeted the second list; this list was studied in one of four conditions, defined by the fully crossed factors of prestudy and poststudy rest duration. Two experiments revealed a beneficial effect of prestudy rest (and, to a lesser extent, of poststudy rest) on list recall. This result is in line with interference-based theories of memory. By contrast, a beneficial effect of prestudy rest is not predicted by consolidation accounts of memory and forgetting; our results thus require additional assumptions and/or a better specification of the consolidation process and its time course in order to be reconciled with consolidation theory.