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Wakeful resting and listening to music are powerful means to modulate memory. How these activities affect memory when directly compared has not been tested so far. In two experiments, participants encoded and immediately recalled two word lists followed by either 6 min wakefully resting or 6 min listening to music. The results of Experiment 1 show that both post-encoding conditions have a similar effect on memory after 1 day. In Experiment 2, we explored the possibility that less concrete words, i.e. lower in imageability than in Experiment 1, are differently affected by the two post-encoding conditions. The results of Experiment 2 show that, when words are less concrete, more words are retained after 1 day when encoding is followed by wakeful resting rather than listening to music. These findings indicate that the effects of wakeful resting and listening to music on memory consolidation are moderated by the concreteness of the encoded material.

Communication and information sharing via social media platforms is a common and popular activity. The majority of existing studies indicate that social media usage has detrimental effects on learning and memory. However, it is an open question as to whether social media usage affects memory even after learning. To test this, healthy young adults learned and immediately recalled a vocabulary list. Subsequent to recall, participants either wakefully rested for 8 min or used social media for 8 min. A delayed recall test took place after the wakeful resting condition and the social media condition and again after 1 day. Our results showed that social media usage, compared with wakeful resting, had detrimental effects on memory performance over both retention intervals. We assume that social media usage interfered with memory consolidation of learned vocabularies and suggest that learners opt for wakeful resting over social media usage as a learning-break activity.

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., Author(s): Markus Martini [sup.1] , Caroline Martini [sup.1] , Pierre Sachse [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.5771.4, 0000 0001 2151 8122, University of Innsbruck, , Innrain 52, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria Introduction [...]

Evidence exists that a brief period of wakeful rest after learning supports memory retention, while interference after learning weakens memory retention. We tested this so-called resting effect for second language learning material. In two counterbalanced within-subject designs, participants were involved in two identical successive learning phases. In each phase, they learned one of two second language stories, immediately followed by a recall phase in the first language. The critical manipulation took place after the immediate recall. Here, participants either rested or worked on a distractor task for 8 min. In Experiment 1, participants worked on a spot-the-difference task (visual distractor condition), and in Experiment 2, they read a New York Times article (verbal distractor condition). After 7 days, all participants were again invited to a second experimental session, where a surprise free recall test took place. Our results showed that second language story retention over a period of 7 days was not supported by a brief period of wakeful rest following learning and recall, independent of the distractor condition. Our findings contribute to an important characterization of the wakeful resting effect in younger adults, which is discussed in the light of existing studies., Author(s): Markus Martini [sup.1], Benjamin Riedlsperger [sup.1], Thomas Maran [sup.1], Pierre Sachse [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.5771.4, 0000 0001 2151 8122, University of Innsbruck, , Innrain 52, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria [...]