Brief re-reading boosts sleep-related prose memory consolidation

Sleep plays a crucial role in memory consolidation. In everyday educational settings, students often rapidly review studied material just before sleep, but the effect of this strategy on subsequent memory has never been investigated. Here we assessed whether briefly re-reading a studied text immediately before a retention interval spent asleep or awake affects its delayed recall. In a mixed design, 34 university students were assigned to a Sleep or a Wake group. Eight hours after studying and immediately recalling a brief text, participants either quickly re-read it (for 1 min) or not, before an approximately 8-h retention interval spent asleep or awake. Main effects of Group and Condition were found (better performance in Sleep vs. Wake and in Re-reading vs. No Re-reading conditions, respectively), as well as an interaction Group x Condition. Crucially, only participants who re-read the text before sleeping showed a net improvement in recall relative to their own initial performance, whereas performance slightly deteriorated in all other conditions. These findings extend previous work on sleep-related prose memory consolidation by showing that a brief pre-sleep review, ecologically similar to common student study habits, can boost subsequent memory beyond mere protection from forgetting. They suggest that quick reviews of studied material at bedtime may represent an effective and practical strategy for memory enhancement in real-life learning contexts.