Abstract
Word paired-associate learning is a well-established task to demonstrate sleep-dependent memory consolidation in adults as well as children. Sleep has also been proposed to benefit episodic features of memory, i.e., a memory for an event (item) bound into the spatiotemporal context it has been experienced in (source). We aimed to explore if sleep enhances word pair memory in children by strengthening the episodic features of the memory, in particular. Sixty-one children (8–12 years) studied two lists of word pairs with 1 h in between. Retrieval testing comprised cued recall of the target word of each word pair (item memory) and recalling in which list the word pair had appeared in (source memory). Retrieval was tested either after 1 h (short retention interval) or after 11 h, with this long retention interval covering either nocturnal sleep or daytime wakefulness. Compared with the wake interval, sleep enhanced separate recall of both word pairs and the lists per se, while recall of the combination of the word pair and the list it had appeared in remained unaffected by sleep. An additional comparison with adult controls (n = 37) suggested that item-source bound memory (combined recall of word pair and list) is generally diminished in children. Our results argue against the view that the sleep-induced enhancement in paired-associate learning in children is a consequence of sleep specifically enhancing the episodic features of the memory representation. On the contrary, sleep in children might strengthen item and source representations in isolation, while leaving the episodic memory representations (item-source binding) unaffected.
Highlights
Sleep facilitates memory consolidation with ample evidence, especially for declarative memories (Rasch and Born, 2013)
Sleep appears to support the binding of item memory into source memory which is characteristic for episodic memory (Inostroza et al, 2013; Oyanedel et al, 2014; Weber et al, 2014), other studies show the opposite, i.e., a ‘de-contextualizing’ effect of postencoding sleep enhancing the unbinding of episodic memory such that the memory for items becomes less dependent on the spatiotemporal source in which it was learned (Cairney et al, 2011; Deliens and Peigneux, 2014; but see Sweegers and Talamini, 2014; Jurewicz et al, 2016, for conflicting evidence)
We used a modified version of the word paired-associate learning task to determine the extent to which sleep’s enhancing effect on word pair memories in children might originate from sleep strengthening episodic features of the memory representations
Summary
Sleep facilitates memory consolidation with ample evidence, especially for declarative memories (Rasch and Born, 2013). Many of these studies have employed the declarative word paired-associate learning task. Sleep appears to support the binding of item memory into source memory which is characteristic for episodic memory (Inostroza et al, 2013; Oyanedel et al, 2014; Weber et al, 2014), other studies show the opposite, i.e., a ‘de-contextualizing’ effect of postencoding sleep enhancing the unbinding of episodic memory such that the memory for items becomes less dependent on the spatiotemporal source in which it was learned (Cairney et al, 2011; Deliens and Peigneux, 2014; but see Sweegers and Talamini, 2014; Jurewicz et al, 2016, for conflicting evidence)
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