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Perhaps you think that the morning is wiser than the evening, and you write about the main thing only with a fresh mind? Try to change your habit: scientists have come to the conclusion that if we write down the events of the day in the evening, this helps us remember them better.
Cognitive psychologist Agnes Szollosi (Ágnes Szőllősi) and colleagues decided to find out whether our ability to remember events depends on the time when we write them down in a diary. Sleep is known to have a beneficial effect on learning and long-term memory formation, so the researchers hypothesized that those who wrote down the day’s events before going to bed would be able to remember more about them after 30 days than those who wrote down the next morning.
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To test this hypothesis, the researchers recruited 109 volunteers aged 18 to 25, who were required to keep a diary on the Internet. All participants in the study were approximately the same age. This made it possible to exclude the influence of age-related changes: over time, the working capacity of people in the evening usually falls.
All participants were divided into three groups. The first group every evening, right before going to bed, described in the diary some event of the past day. The second group took notes in the morning, immediately after waking up. The third group described what happened the day before the next day, in the evening before going to bed. Volunteers kept a diary for five days, in which they also rated the importance of each event on a five-point scale, noted the duration of these events, and recorded how many hours they slept the previous night.
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All groups kept diaries in the same way, the duration of sleep in different groups did not differ significantly. And yet, the group that took notes in the morning, after a month, remembered the events described by about 10% worse than the two “evening” groups. Interestingly, they were no less confident than the rest of the accuracy of their memories. Those who kept a diary in the evening remembered any events better, regardless of their importance to the author.
The researchers concluded that the time of day at which we recall an event from memory affects the subsequent consolidation of this memory. They believe that memory in an “unstable” state (which occurs the moment we recall it) is easily distorted. When an entry in the diary is made before going to bed, sleep helps to stabilize and consolidate memory. If a person remembers an event in the morning, subsequent events of the day can distort these memories.
Подробнее см. А. Szőllősi et al. «A diary after dinner: How the time of event recording influences later accessibility of diary events», The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, July 2015.