Abstract
Introduction: Consolidation is defined as the time necessary for memory stabilization after learning. In the present study we focused on effects of interference during the first 12 consolidation minutes after learning. Participants had to learn a set of German – Japanese word pairs in an initial learning task and a different set of German – Japanese word pairs in a subsequent interference task. The interference task started in different experimental conditions at different time points (0, 3, 6, and 9 min) after the learning task and was followed by subsequent cued recall tests. In a control experiment the interference periods were replaced by rest periods without any interference.Results: The interference task decreased memory performance by up to 20%, with negative effects at all interference time points and large variability between participants concerning both the time point and the size of maximal interference. Further, fast learners seem to be more affected by interference than slow learners.Discussion: Our results indicate that the first 12 min after learning are highly important for memory consolidation, without a general pattern concerning the precise time point of maximal interference across individuals. This finding raises doubts about the generalized learning recipes and calls for individuality of learning schedules.
Highlights
Consolidation is defined as the time necessary for memory stabilization after learning
The present study aims at direct investigation of the temporal profile of declarative memory consolidation on a time scale in the range of 12 min, referring to the seminal studies of Müller and Pilzecker (1900) and Cowan et al (2004)
We found a negative correlation between the maximal interference effect and learning time, but no significant effect between the time of the maximal interference effect and learning time
Summary
Consolidation is defined as the time necessary for memory stabilization after learning. In the typically very dense school and university schedules, encoding and consolidation from different learning units can temporally overlap and in the worst case interfere and negatively affect overall learning performance. Theories of memory storage and forgetting have a long history of research with several examples of how an ongoing learning process can be affected by an interference with a secondary learning process. Such interference effects have already been reported in the “Kamin blocking effect” during classical conditioning, where an already learned association between an unconditional stimulus (US) and a conditional stimulus (CS) is weakened by the introduction of a secondary conditioning stimulus (Kamin, 1968)
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