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The role of sleep in forming a memory representation of a two‐dimensional space
Author(s) -
Coutanche Marc N.,
Gianessi Carol A.,
Chanales Avi J.H.,
Willison Kate W.,
ThompsonSchill Sharon L.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
hippocampus
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.767
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1098-1063
pISSN - 1050-9631
DOI - 10.1002/hipo.22157
Subject(s) - psychology , wakefulness , memory consolidation , sleep (system call) , cognitive psychology , representation (politics) , space (punctuation) , inference , spatial relation , electroencephalography , artificial intelligence , computer science , neuroscience , hippocampus , politics , political science , law , operating system
ABSTRACT There is ample evidence from human and animal models that sleep contributes to the consolidation of newly learned information. The precise role of sleep for integrating information into interconnected memory representations is less well understood. Building on prior findings that following sleep (as compared to wakefulness) people are better able to draw inferences across learned associations in a simple hierarchy, we ask how sleep helps consolidate relationships in a more complex representational space. We taught 60 subjects spatial relationships between pairs of buildings, which (unknown to participants) formed a two‐dimensional grid. Critically, participants were only taught a subset of the many possible spatial relations, which allowed them to potentially infer the remainder. After a 12 h period that either did or did not include a normal period of sleep, participants returned to the lab. We examined the quality of each participant's map of the two‐dimensional space, and their knowledge of relative distances between buildings. After 12 h with sleep, subjects could more accurately map the full space than subjects who experienced only wakefulness. The incorporation of untaught, but inferable, associations was particularly improved. We further found that participants' distance judgment performance related to self‐reported navigational style, but only after sleep. These findings demonstrate that consolidation over a night of sleep begins to integrate relations into an interconnected complex representation, in a way that supports spatial relational inference. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.