ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology2019
Post-encoding wakeful resting supports the retention of new verbal memories in children aged 13-14 years.
Article in The British journal of developmental psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Should we all just take 10? A meta-analysis of wakeful rest.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Pooled it
- Resting States and Memory Consolidation: A Preregistered Replication and Meta-Analysis.Scientific reports · 2019Pooled it
- Wakeful rest and memory consolidation in an ecologically valid educational setting: no benefit over distractor tasks.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Resting after learning or repeating the learned?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Waking rest during retention facilitates memory consolidation, but so does social media use.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Post-encoding task engagement not attentional load is detrimental to awake consolidation.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Individual differences in sensory processing sensitivity amplify effects of post-learning activity for better and for worse.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Wakeful Rest Benefits Recall, but Not Recognition, of Incidentally Encoded Memory Stimuli in Younger and Older Adults.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Wakeful resting and listening to music contrast their effects on verbal long-term memory in dependence on word concreteness.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- 'Sleep-dependent' memory consolidation? Brief periods of post-training rest and sleep provide an equivalent benefit for both declarative and procedural memory.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- Individual differences in working memory capacity moderate effects of post-learning activity on memory consolidation over the long term.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Factors modulating the effects of waking rest on memory.Cognitive processing · 2020Article
- Wakeful resting and memory retention: a study with healthy older and younger adults.Cognitive processing · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evidence primarily exists in adults that engaging in task-related mental activity after new learning results in increased forgetting of learned information, compared with quietly resting in the minutes that follow learning, where less forgetting is observed. The current study investigated whether the beneficial effect of post-encoding rest can be observed in children aged 13-14 years. Each child (N = 102) encoded two word lists. After the presentation and immediate recall of one word list, children wakefully rested for 10 min (resting condition), after presentation and immediate recall of the other word list, they solved visuo-spatial problems for 10 min (problem-solving condition). Seven days later, a surprise free recall test for the two word lists took place. Our results showed that children retained more words over 7 days in the resting condition than with the problem-solving condition. Post-hoc analyses revealed that the resting effect was a function of the number of words recollected during the immediate recall. Specifically, those children who recalled fewest words (≤ 13/30 words) in the immediate recall showed a significant resting effect. There was no resting effect in those who recalled a mid-range (14-16/30 words) or a high number (>16/30 words) of words. These results provide new insights into the factors that influence memory in children, and suggest that a few minutes of wakeful rest benefits memory, relative to engaging in an ongoing task. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Task-related mental activity after encoding weakens memory retention more than wakeful resting. Beneficial effect of resting after encoding was found primarily in younger and older adults. What does this study add? We investigated children at the age of 13-14 years. 8-min post-encoding wakeful resting supports memory retention over 7 days. Individuals differ in the impact of a brief period of wakeful resting after learning. Only children with lower immediate memory performances profited from wakeful resting.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.