title: 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.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology (M304), University of Western Australia, Perth, 6009, Western Australia, Australia, ullrich.ecker@uwa.edu.au.
authors.forename: Ullrich K H
authors.initials: UK
authors.lastname: Ecker
authors.forename: Jia-Xin
authors.initials: JX
authors.lastname: Tay
authors.forename: Gordon D A
authors.initials: GD
authors.lastname: Brown
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D000069077:Memory Consolidation / Q000502:physiology*; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult