Sleep's contribution to memory formation.

The brain state of sleep contributes in a specific way to the formation of long-term memory. Over the past 10 years, research on the psychological and neuronal mechanisms underlying this process has rapidly increased, including studies in humans and rodents across early and late life. Intended to comprehensively cover this research, our review reveals that the majority of findings is consistent with the concept of long-term memory formation during sleep as an active systems consolidation process that concurs with widespread synaptic down-selection.

Long-Term Visual Gist Abstraction Independent of Post-Encoding Sleep.

Current theories of memory processing postulate a slow transformation from episodic to abstract, gist-like memories. We previously demonstrated that sleep shortly after learning improves gist abstraction in healthy volunteers across a one-year retention interval using a visual version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Here, we investigate the temporal evolution of this effect by testing recognition performance on a similar DRM task immediately after encoding, as well as 1 week and 1 year later.

The effect of fasting on human memory consolidation.

The consolidation of long-term memory is thought to critically rely on sleep. However, first evidence from a study in Drosophila suggests that hunger, as another brain state, can benefit memory consolidation as well. Here, we report two human (within-subjects crossover) experiments examining the effects of fasting (versus satiated conditions) during a 10-hour post-encoding consolidation period on subsequent recall of declarative and procedural memories in healthy men.

Sleep shapes the associative structure underlying pattern completion in multielement event memory.

Sleep supports the consolidation of episodic memory. It is, however, a matter of ongoing debate how this effect is established, because, so far, it has been demonstrated almost exclusively for simple associations, which lack the complex associative structure of real-life events, typically comprising multiple elements with different association strengths. Because of this associative structure interlinking the individual elements, a partial cue (e.

Sleep promotes T-cell migration towards CCL19 via growth hormone and prolactin signaling in humans.

Sleep strongly supports the formation of adaptive immunity, e.g., after vaccination.

Sleep consolidates stimulus-response learning.

Performing a motor response to a sensory stimulus creates a memory trace whose behavioral correlates are classically investigated in terms of repetition priming effects. Such stimulus-response learning entails two types of associations that are partly independent: (1) an association between the stimulus and the motor response and (2) an association between the stimulus and the classification task in which it is encountered. Here, we tested whether sleep supports long-lasting stimulus-response learning on a task requiring participants (1) for establishing stimulus-classification associations to classify presented objects along two different dimensions ("size" and "mechanical") and (2) as motor response (action) to respond with either the left or right index finger.

Association Between Objectively Assessed Sleep and Depressive Symptoms During Pregnancy and Post-partum.

Introduction: Sleep problems are common in pregnancy but many studies have relied only on self-reported sleep measures. We studied the association between objectively measured sleep and peripartum depressive symptoms in pregnant women.

Material And Methods: Sleep was assessed using Actiwatch accelerometers in a sample of 163 pregnant women in the late first (weeks 11-15) or early second trimester (weeks 16-19).

Occipital sleep spindles predict sequence learning in a visuo-motor task.

Study Objectives: The brain appears to use internal models to successfully interact with its environment via active predictions of future events. Both internal models and the predictions derived from them are based on previous experience. However, it remains unclear how previously encoded information is maintained to support this function, especially in the visual domain.

Sleep Strengthens Predictive Sequence Coding.

Predictive-coding theories assume that perception and action are based on internal models derived from previous experience. Such internal models require selection and consolidation to be stored over time. Sleep is known to support memory consolidation.

The rod signaling pathway in marsupial retinae.

The retinal rod pathway, featuring dedicated rod bipolar cells (RBCs) and AII amacrine cells, has been intensely studied in placental mammals. Here, we analyzed the rod pathway in a nocturnal marsupial, the South American opossum Monodelphis domestica to elucidate whether marsupials have a similar rod pathway. The retina was dominated by rods with densities of 338,000-413,000/mm².

Sleep Supports the Slow Abstraction of Gist from Visual Perceptual Memories.

Sleep benefits the consolidation of individual episodic memories. In the long run, however, it may be more efficient to retain the abstract gist of single, related memories, which can be generalized to similar instances in the future. While episodic memory is enhanced after one night of sleep, effective gist abstraction is thought to require multiple nights.