Sleep Strengthens Memories And Makes Them Resistant To Interfering Information

Whether sleep facilitates memory consolidation is a question as old as the experimental study of memory itself. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of experiments exploring this relationship. Although there is near-consensus that sleep promotes learning of certain types of perceptual memories (for example, learning to tap numeric sequences on a keyboard), there is ongoing debate about whether sleep benefits so-called declarative memory, a key type of memory that is based in the brain's hippocampus.

In the new work, the researchers studied the influence of sleep on declarative memory in healthy, college-aged adults. The results demonstrated a robust effect: Compared to participants who did not sleep during the trials, those who slept between learning and testing were able to recall more of the original words they had learned earlier. The beneficial influence of sleep was particularly marked when participants were presented with the challenge of "interference"--competing word-pair information--just prior to testing. A follow-up group further demonstrated that this sleep benefit for memory persists over the subsequent waking day. This work clarifies and extends previous study of sleep and memory by demonstrating that sleep does not just passively and transiently protect memories; rather, sleep plays an active role in memory consolidation.

The researchers include Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen of Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA; Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School and Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA; Justin C. Hulbert of the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR; David F. Dinges and Sharon L. Thompson-Schill of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA.

This work was supported by the University of Pennsylvania's Nassau Undergraduate Research Fund (J.C.H.) and by the National Institutes of Health.