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The role of sleep in cognitive processing: focusing on memory consolidation
Author(s) -
Chambers Alexis M.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
wiley interdisciplinary reviews: cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.526
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1939-5086
pISSN - 1939-5078
DOI - 10.1002/wcs.1433
Subject(s) - memory consolidation , cognition , consolidation (business) , categorization , psychology , sleep (system call) , cognitive psychology , childhood memory , cognitive science , creativity , cognitive neuroscience , aside , semantic memory , neuroscience , computer science , social psychology , artificial intelligence , accounting , hippocampus , business , operating system , art , literature
Research indicates that sleep promotes various cognitive functions, such as decision‐making, language, categorization, and memory. Of these, most work has focused on the influence of sleep on memory, with ample work showing that sleep enhances memory consolidation, a process that stores new memories in the brain over time. Recent psychological and neurophysiological research has vastly increased understanding of this process. Such work not only suggests that consolidation relies on plasticity‐related mechanisms that reactivate and stabilize memory representations, but also that this process may be experimentally manipulated by methods that target which memory traces are reactivated during sleep. Furthermore, aside from memory storage capabilities, memory consolidation also appears to reorganize and integrate memories with preexisting knowledge, which may facilitate the discovery of underlying rules and associations that benefit other cognitive functioning, including problem solving and creativity. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1433. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1433 This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory Psychology > Learning Neuroscience > Cognition