Humans can learn new information during sleep

Arzi, Anat; Shedlesky, Limor; Ben-Shaul, Mor; Nasser, Khitam; Oksenberg, Arie; Hairston, Ilana S.; Sobel, Noam

doi:10.1038/nn.3193

Cited by 186 publications

(179 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Most crucially, Experiment 3 revealed that multisensory integration can occur even when both stimuli are subliminally presented using masking. This is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of multisensory integration in complete unawareness, with strict measures of stimulus discriminability in awake participants (see Arzi et al, 2012, for multisensory integration during sleep).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

et al. 2014

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Multisensory integration is thought to require conscious perception. Although previous studies have shown that an invisible stimulus could be integrated with an audible one, none have demonstrated integration of two subliminal stimuli of different modalities. Here, pairs of identical or different audiovisual target letters (the sound /b/ with the written letter “b” or “m,” respectively) were preceded by pairs of masked identical or different audiovisual prime digits (the sound /6/ with the written digit “6” or “8,” respectively). In three experiments, awareness of the audiovisual digit primes was manipulated, such that participants were either unaware of the visual digit, the auditory digit, or both. Priming of the semantic relations between the auditory and visual digits was found in all experiments. Moreover, a further experiment showed that unconscious multisensory integration was not obtained when participants did not undergo prior conscious training of the task. This suggests that following conscious learning, unconscious processing suffices for multisensory integration.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

et al. 2014

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“…For example, sleep has been shown to induce false memories based on logical inference (Payne et al, 2009). A recent study even provided the first piece of evidence that humans are capable of learning completely novel information during sleep (Arzi et al, 2012). Thus, a speculative hypothesis is that the formation of a modality-specific lexeme in one modality during encoding may give rise to the emergence of its counterpart in the other modality during offline consolidation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition from unseen or unheard novel words: Lexical consolidation across modalities

Bakker

Takashima

Hell

et al. 2014

Journal of Memory and Language

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a b s t r a c tIn four experiments we investigated the formation of novel word memories across modalities, using competition between novel words and their existing phonological/orthographic neighbours as a test of lexical integration. Auditorily acquired novel words entered into competition both in the spoken modality (Experiment 1) and in the written modality (Experiment 4) after a consolidation period of 24 h. Words acquired from print, on the other hand, showed competition effects after 24 h in a visual word recognition task (Experiment 3) but required additional training and a consolidation period of a week before entering into spoken-word competition (Experiment 2). These cross-modal effects support the hypothesis that lexicalised rather than episodic representations underlie post-consolidation competition effects. We suggest that sublexical phoneme-grapheme conversion during novel word encoding and/or offline consolidation enables the formation of modality-specific lexemes in the untrained modality, which subsequently undergo the same cortical integration process as explicitly perceived word forms in the trained modality. Although conversion takes place in both directions, speech input showed an advantage over print both in terms of lexicalisation and explicit memory performance. In conclusion, the brain is able to integrate and consolidate internally generated lexical information as well as external perceptual input.

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“…Arzi et al (2012) paired different tones with different odors to demonstrate that simple condition paradigms using the olfactory sniff response (longer in-breaths while presenting positive odors compared to the inbreaths while presenting negative odors) can be carried out during sleep and that the effects carry over to waking life. For instance, the tone presentation can induce differences in breathing patterns without the olfactory stimuli if paired during sleep.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Olfactory Stimulation During Sleep Can Reactivate Odor-Associated Images

et al. 2014

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Purpose Research has indicated that olfactory stimuli presented during sleep might reactivate memories that are associated with this odor. The present study is the first to examine whether learned associations between odor and images can be reactivated during sleep. Methods Sixteen healthy, normosmic volunteers underwent a balanced learning task in which pictures of rural scenes and pictures of city scenes were associated with hydrogen sulfide (smell of rotten eggs) or phenyl ethyl alcohol (smell of roses) in the evening in a crossover design. During the subsequent night, they were stimulated with olfactory stimuli (hydrogen sulfide, phenyl ethyl alcohol, and neutral) during REM periods. Participants were awakened 1 min after the stimulation and dream reports were elicited. Results The olfactory congruent stimuli significantly increased the probability of dreams about rural scenes, whereas the same effect was not found for city scenes. Conclusions As these findings support the hypothesis of reactivation during sleep, it would be very interesting to study the effect of dreams as a tool to measure reactivation of task material on sleep-dependent memory consolidation.

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Humans can learn new information during sleep

Cited by 186 publications

References 52 publications

Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

Competition from unseen or unheard novel words: Lexical consolidation across modalities

Olfactory Stimulation During Sleep Can Reactivate Odor-Associated Images

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