Wakeful resting and memory retention: a study with healthy older and younger adults

Abstract

Studies indicate that a brief period of wakeful rest after learning supports memory retention, whereas distraction weakens it. It is open for investigation whether advanced age has a significant effect on the impact of post-learning wakeful rest on memory retention for verbal information when compared to a cognitively demanding distraction task. In this study, we examined (1) whether post-learning rest promotes verbal memory retention in younger and older adults and (2) whether the magnitude of the rest benefit changes with increasing age. Younger adults and older adults learned and immediately recalled two consecutive word lists. After one word list, participants rested wakefully for 8 min; after the other list, they solved matrices. Memory performance was again tested in a surprise free recall test at the end of the experimental session. We found that, overall, younger adults outperformed older adults. Also, memory retention was higher following a wakeful rest phase compared to distraction. A detailed analysis revealed that this wakeful rest benefit was significant for the older adults group, whereas the younger adults group retained a similar amount of information in both post-encoding conditions. We assume that older adults can profit more from a wakeful rest phase after learning and are more prone to distraction than younger adults. With increasing age, a short break immediately after information uptake may help better retain the previously learned information, while distraction after learning tends to weaken memory retention.

Effects of wakeful resting versus social media usage after learning on the retention of new memories

“…For instance, Varma et al () found no differences in forgetting rates when researchers asked participants to wakefully rest after encoding, compared with participants who worked on a two‐back task or even on a cognitively more effortful three‐back task. Similarly, Martini, Riedlsperger, Maran, and Sachse () found no differences between wakeful resting and task‐related cognitive engagement when they asked participants to encode texts in their second language, independent of whether participants were involved in a verbal (reading a newspaper article) or visuospatial (finding errors in pictures) filler task after encoding (see also Fatania & Mercer, ; Martini, Zamarian, Sachse, Martini, & Delazer, ). These results suggest that under certain conditions, task‐related cognitive and sensory engagement compared with wakefully resting do not differ in their impact on memory.…”

“…found no differences between wakeful resting and task-related cognitive engagement when they asked participants to encode texts in their second language, independent of whether participants were involved in a verbal (reading a newspaper article) or visuospatial (finding errors in pictures) filler task after encoding (see alsoFatania & Mercer, 2017;Martini, Zamarian, Sachse, Martini, & Delazer, 2018). These resultssuggest that under certain conditions, task-related cognitive and sensory engagement compared with wakefully resting do not differ in their impact on memory.…”

Benefit of wakeful resting on gist and peripheral memory retrieval in healthy younger and older adults

“…Previous research [1,5,36,37] maintained that younger participants tend to build stronger memory representations than older adults. This suggests that healthy older individuals should be more vulnerable to interference between encoding and retrieval.…”

“…Retroactive Interference (RI) occurs when new information processed after initial learning impairs the recollection of previously encoded material [1]. Several studies have reported that wakeful resting, between encoding and retrieval, minimises the likelihood of RI and improves verbal and non-verbal memory performance in healthy young adults [2,3] as well as in older people [4,5] and in amnesic patients [6][7][8][9]. Studies with rodents have replicated the benefits of minimal interference on memory task performance [10,11].…”

“…Furthermore, the role of age in memory recollection of gist and peripheral verbal traces after interference or wakeful resting has never been explored. Although a handful of studies have attempted to compare memory recollection performance of older and younger adults while controlling post-encoding behavioural state [4,5], no study so far has compared these effects for memory of central (gist) and secondary (peripheral) material between older and younger groups. The present study was designed to fill these gaps in the literature.…”