The Effect of Post-Learning Rest on False Memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm

Poster Session E - Monday, April 15, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

William H. Livingston¹, Erin J. Wamsley¹; ¹Furman University Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience

While sleep has long been known to benefit memory consolidation, recent studies demonstrate that even a brief period of eyes-closed waking rest following encoding can similarly benefit memory. Eyes-closed rest has been shown to benefit a wide variety of memory types, including for declarative, procedural and spatial learning. But sleep is argued to not only quantitatively strengthen memory traces, but also qualitatively transform them over time. For example, sleep may influence false memory formation. The present study tested whether post-encoding waking rest similarly affects the formation of false memories, using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm. We hypothesized that rest would increase false memory as measured by recall, but decrease false memory as measured by recognition. In a within-subjects design, N=51 participants either sat quietly with their eyes closed for 15 minutes or spent an equivalent period of time completing a distractor task, following auditory encoding of 8 DRM word lists. Afterwards, participants were tested on their memory, via both recall and recognition. There was no significant effect of rest on false memory using either recall (t(50) = 0.26, p = .796) or recognition (t(50) = 1.20, p = .237) tests. There was also no significant effect of rest on memory for studied words (recall: t(50) = 1.32, p = .194; recognition: t(50) = 0.51, p = .612). This may indicate that waking rest does not affect certain types of qualitative memory transformation thought to occur during sleep, including the gist-extraction type processes underlying false memory in the DRM.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other