Spontaneous Thought and Memory Consolidation: An Investigation into Mindwandering Evoked by Preferred Music and Its Influence on Short-Term Memory Consolidation

Research has shown that rest is beneficial for memory consolidation. However, periods ofrest are also prone to evoke mind wandering (MW) episodes, which have been observed to be anobstacle to learning. As such, an apparent paradox arises from these observations: individualsbenefit from rest to consolidate memories, but those periods of rest are likely to elicit MW episodes,which are seen as impeding consolidation. Using the caught probe paradigm, we measured theeffect of MW frequency over performance in two dot pattern classification tasks after two types ofperiods of rest: rest in silence and rest with preferred music. We found that MW and rest conditionsinteract to predict accuracy in a Novel or Old categorisation task, but not in a Category Classificationtask. Although rest with music was predictive of better post-rest task performance in the Novel orOld task, MW frequency was related with higher accuracy only when participants rested in silence.What is more, we found that participants’ attitudes towards music reliably moderated the effect ofMW over the Novel or Old task accuracy. Together, these results show that MW during rest ispotentially beneficial for short-term memory consolidation and does not necessarily interfere withit.