Dependence on REM Sleep of Overnight Improvement of a Perceptual Skill

Abstract

Several paradigms of perceptual learning suggest that practice can trigger long-term, experience-dependent changes in the adult visual system of humans. As shown here, performance of a basic visual discrimination task improved after a normal night's sleep. Selective disruption of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep resulted in no performance gain during a comparable sleep interval, although non-REM slow-wave sleep disruption did not affect improvement. On the other hand, deprivation of REM sleep had no detrimental effects on the performance of a similar, but previously learned, task. These results indicate that a process of human memory consolidation, active during sleep, is strongly dependent on REM sleep.

Transient epileptic amnesia: a description of the clinical and neuropsychological features in 10 cases and a review of the literature

“…In this context, it is of interest that TEA often occurs in relation to sleep, as there is accumulating evidence that processes of memory consolidation may be particularly active in sleep. 44 45 The fact that many patients have early morning TEA attacks and show abnormal sleep EEGs suggests that disturbed consolidation during sleep may be a critical factor. In keeping with this hypothesis is the finding of impaired memory at long, but not short, retention intervals in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.…”

Sleep-dependent motor memory plasticity in the human brain

“…Demonstrations of overnight, sleep-dependent learning have now been reported across both sensory (Karni et al, 1994;Gais et al, 2000;Stickgold et al, 2000a,b;Fenn et al, 2003;Atienza et al, 2004;Gaab et al, 2004) and motor (Smith and MacNeill, 1994;Fischer et al, 2002;Walker et al, 2002Walker et al, , 2003aKorman et al, 2003;Huber et al, 2004;Robertson et al, 2004;Kuriyama et al, 2004) skill memory domains.…”

“…Demonstrations of overnight, sleep-dependent learning have now been reported across both sensory (Karni et al, 1994;Gais et al, 2000; Stickgold et al, 2000a,b;Fenn et al, 2003;Atienza et al, 2004;Gaab et al, 2004) Regarding motor-sequence learning, Walker et al (2002, 2003a,b) have shown that a night of sleep can trigger significant improvements in both performance speed and accuracy on a finger-tapping task, while equivalent periods of time awake do not result in any such learning enhancements. Furthermore, these overnight learning gains correlated with the amount of stage two non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, particularly late in the night (Walker et al, 2002).…”

Consciousness, brain, neuroplasticity

“…Memory encoding and retrieval take place most effectively during wakefulness (Diekelmann and Born, 2010), but sleep also promotes the consolidation of newly acquired information in memory and its integration within pre-existing knowledge networks (Karni et al, 1994; Askenasy et al, 1997). Memory consolidation during sleep is often considered as an off-line brain process of stabilization of such newly acquired information, but there is also consolidation of false memories of events that never happened.…”