Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior work shows that a brief period of minimal interference, otherwise known as wakeful rest, has memory enhancing effects. A recent meta-analysis, Parra et. al (2026), observed large improvements in memory for older adults and patients, and, disappointingly, a smaller effect for young adults. Building off of the findings of this work and using existing data from our lab, we did a random-effects meta-regression to explore why. Specifically, we pooled 38 standardized mean differences, derived from 14 studies, to investigate the potential moderation effect of sex on the wakeful rest effect. The results show that rest was significantly beneficial for men, but not for women. Future work is needed to clarify why this pattern was observed.