Wakeful rest and memory consolidation in an ecologically valid educational setting: no benefit over distractor tasks

Post-learning activities are thought to influence how well newly learned information is consolidated into memory. The present study investigated whether wakeful rest provides advantages for memory consolidation compared to common distractor activities. University students (N = 161) read an expository text and were randomly assigned to one of four 8-minute post-reading conditions: wakeful rest, social media use, math task, or reading an interference text. Participants completed an immediate test assessing both conceptual understanding and factual recall, followed by a delayed test one week later using different but conceptually aligned test items. Results showed a significant decline in performance from the immediate to the delayed test across all groups. However, the wakeful rest condition did not yield consistent benefits relative to the distractor conditions. These findings suggest that in a real-world educational setting, wakeful rest may not provide superior benefits for conceptual understanding and memory retention relative to other post-learning activities.