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<\/a><\/p>\nWhen Payne et al. (2012) reviewed the training and testing data, they did not find any differences between the groups who trained at 9am or 9pm and tested 30 minutes later. However, participants who trained at 9pm and tested 12 hours later performed better than those who trained at 9am and tested 12 hours later. This difference in performance was related to the night of sleep in between training and testing for the 9pm training group. Also, the unrelated word pairs, such as HAPPY- EXAM, were poorly remembered by the participants who were awake during the 12 hour train-test interval when compared to those who slept during the 12 hours. Finally, those participants who trained at 9pm and tested 24 hours later performed much better than those who trained at 9am and tested 24 hours later. The benefit for performance was noted here only when sleep occurred directly after training.<\/p>\n
Payne et al. (2012) were also able to examine the amount of forgetting that occurred during waking hours over the 24 hour test interval by comparing this data to that of the participants in the 12 hour train-test interval. For the participants who trained at 9am and tested 24 hours later, there was double the amount of forgetting of unrelated word pairs and over three times the amount of forgetting of related word pairs compared to participants who trained at 9pm and tested 24 hours later. Payne et al. (2012) attributed this to the sleep that occurred right after training, and they suggested that sleep slowed the process of forgetting more for the participants who trained at 9pm and tested 24 hours later.<\/p>\n
A crucial point to take away from this experiment is that those who slept after training did better in testing than those who did not sleep. This is pretty strong evidence to support the following suggestion: \u201cDon\u2019t pull all-nighters!\u201d The experiment also showed that those who slept immediately after training tested better than those who were awake. This would mean that it might be a good idea to study before going to bed, rather than only in the morning before an exam. Just some food for thought with dreaded finals week quickly approaching. Good luck and sleep tight!<\/p>\n
Reference<\/p>\n
Payne, J.D., Tucker, M.A., Ellenbogen, J.M., Wamsley, E.J., Walker, M.P., Schacter, D.L., et al. (2012). Memory for semantically related\u00a0and unrelated declarative information: The benefit of sleep, the cost of wake. PLoS ONE, 7(3)<\/i>, e33079. doi: 10.1371\/journal.pone.0033079<\/p>\n