No Evidence for a Wakeful Rest Benefit on Associative Memory: A Within-Participant EEG Study

Wakeful rest after learning has been proposed to facilitate memory consolidation compared to engaging in a distraction task, with prior EEG studies linking slow oscillation power during rest to better memory performance. However, replication attempts have yielded mixed results. We investigated whether 10 minutes of wakeful rest would enhance associative memory performance relative to 10 minutes of a hippocampus-dependent auditory short-term memory distraction task, using a within-participant design with continuous EEG recording. We employed both a replication-inspired analytical approach, closely modeled on prior work, and a data-specific approach adapted to our dataset. Contrary to our hypo