Sleep and memory

Sleep and memory

1. Sleep improves memory

   • Less forgetting over periods of sleep compared to periods of wake
   • Must eliminate confounds
     • Circadian rhythms
     • Fatigue
     • Prior experience
   • Different EEG and neurochemistry of SWS and REM suggests different roles
     • Dual process: SWS = declarative, REM = procedural?
   • Stronger effects for declarative than procedural

2. Causal evidence

   • Pharmacologically increase spindle count = better dec mem (Mednick et al., 2013)
   • TMR improvements occurred only during SWS for dec (odour based = Rasch et al., 2007; auditory based = Rudoy et al., 2009)

3. Huber et al. (2004) supports synaptic homeostasis model

   • Local potentiation of cells = local increase in SWA

4. Other benefits

   • REM improved creativity on Remote Associates Task (Cai et al., 2009)
   • Sleep unifies learning chunks (Kuriyama et al., 1994)
   • Integration assoc with spindle activity (Tamminen et al., 2010)
   • Better abstraction of gist e.g. more likely to produce critical word in DRM paradigm (Payne et al., 2009)

5. Need a more integrative literature!!