Posttraining rapid eye movement (REM) sleep has been reported to be important for efficient memory consolidation. The present results demonstrate increases in the intensity of REM sleep during the night of sleep following cognitive procedural/implicit task acquisition. These REM increases manifest as increases in total number of rapid eye movements (REMs) and REM densities, whereas the actual time spent in REM sleep did not change. Further, the participants with the higher intelligence (IQ) scores showed superior task acquisition scores as well as larger posttraining increases in number of REMs and REM density. No other sleep state changes were observed. None of the pretraining baseline measures of REM sleep were correlated with either measured IQ or task performance. Posttraining increases in REM sleep intensity implicate REM sleep mechanisms in further off-line memory processing, and provide a biological marker of learning potential.There is now a substantial body of evidence from animal (Smith 1985(Smith , 1996Datta 2000;Louie and Wilson 2001) and human (Smith 1995(Smith , 2001Maquet et al. 2000;Stickgold et al. 2000;Laureys et al. 2001) studies to support the idea that further offline memory processing or consolidation occurs during postacquisition REM sleep. In humans, REM sleep is evidently important for the efficient memory consolidation of procedural/ implicit tasks (Smith 2001). In a recent review, all seven studies that imposed REM sleep deprivation after acquisition of procedural learning tasks reported subsequent memory deficits. As well, 14 of 16 studies which observed sleep following procedural task acquisition reported increases in time spent in REM sleep, percent REM sleep, or REM sleep intensity (Smith 2001).The reported relationship between "native" or baseline amounts of REM sleep and learning potential, within or between species, has been inconsistent. REM sleep has been argued to be positively correlated with intelligence (Petre-Quadens and de Lee 1970;Pagel et al. 1973), negatively correlated with intelligence (Busby and Pivik 1983), and to have no relationship at all (Siegal 2001). However, it is likely that REM sleep has multiple functions (Rechtschaffen 1998), and thus it would be difficult to show such a singular relationship. It seems more likely that the posttraining REM sleep response to task acquisition, in terms of amount and/ or intensity, is a more useful indicator of learning potential. For example, it has been reported in rats (Smith and Wong 1991) that the magnitude of the posttraining REM sleep increase was dependent upon whether the animal was a "fast learner" or a "slow learner." Fast-learning animals showed marked increases in number of minutes of REM sleep, even following acquisition of simple tasks, whereas the slow-learning rats, although they did learn equally well, showed very small posttraining REM sleep increases. When the task became very difficult, only the rats that had exhibited large REM increases (fast learners) following the easy tasks were able to master the...
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