The effect of sleep on the consolidation of episodic and semantic memories in a naturalistic learning task
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2023-07-18
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en
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Sleep has been shown to aid in the consolidation of new memories, but there is still debate in the field of the extent to which these results are generalizable. Most experimental designs finding enhancement effects of sleep on memory integration focus on isolating specific memory testing, of which the degree to which they translate to more naturalistic learning tasks remains unknown. In this study, participants learned factual knowledge in a learning session and then a testing session, separated by either a period of sleep or daytime wakefulness. We combined testing episodic and semantic memory into one naturalistic learning paradigm. Participants in the sleep group (n = 15) performed the learning phase in the evening and the testing phase in the next morning after a night of nocturnal sleep. Participants in the wake group (n = 18) performed the learning phase in the morning and the testing phase in the evening of the same day. Semantic memory tests have shown mixed results with regard to the role of sleep; therefore, we attempt to investigate in the study how sleep effects usually found in episodic memory translate to semantic memory tasks. In the testing phase, a combination of six tasks were performed to measure semantic and episodic memory in the form of explicit rule learning, generalization memory (both to familiar and unfamiliar targets), factual knowledge, lexical integration of given picture-word pair names and an MST location test that measured pattern separation and spatial memory. Only the generalization new task showed a benefit of sleep over wakefulness. No further evidence was found in any of the tests that sleep enhances memory consolidation, measured at p
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