The Effect of Smartphone Use on Memory Consolidation

Description: Sleep and quiet rest have both been shown to facilitate the consolidation of memory. We explored the features of quiet rest after learning that account for its effect on memory consolidation, experimentally manipulating the activity that participants engaged in during the minutes after encoding. Eyes-closed quiet rest was compared to both smartphone usage and mental arithmetic. We hypothesized that conditions characterized by minimal mental effort would result in improved memory consolidation, with even very simple instructions to attend to internal states (mental arithmetic) interfering with the memory benefit of rest. Three groups of subjects learned how to categorize 270 abstract dot patterns into three different categories. Following a 15min break in which subjects either rested, used their smartphone, or performed mental arithmetic, participants were tested on their ability to correctly categorize these same dot patterns, as well as new dot patterns, and the category prototypes from which the dot patterns were created.