Reactivation fails to offer the improvement sleep does

TL;DR

The study finds that reactivating memories while awake does not improve learning like sleep does, suggesting sleep has a unique role in memory enhancement.

Contribution

The novel finding is that wake reactivation fails to replicate the memory improvement achieved during REM sleep.

Findings

Reactivation during wakefulness does not improve performance on the Weather Prediction Task.

Interference after REM sleep affects memory differently than interference during wakefulness.

Abstract

In a dynamic process that ultimately affords memories their persistence, memory reconsolidation can serve to strengthen associations following reactivation, particularly in sleep, where active processes may effect overnight enhancement. Reactivation can also occur in wake, where improvement would be unexpected. In an earlier study using performance on the Weather Prediction Task (WPT) as a measure of probabilistic category learning, we looked at the effect of sleep and found significant improvement after a daytime nap, where improvement correlated with the amount of REM sleep obtained. When we introduced interference training following sleep, this REM sleep benefit vanished: post-learning task memory was otherwise preserved. Here, we follow up on these results and test whether reactivation itself—wake reactivation—might be sufficient to induce the improvement found after REM sleep. Our results show that it is not: we saw no improvement on the WPT following reactivation in wake, suggesting sleep may be unique in supporting memory improvement. When we looked at interference effects, we saw unexplained differences between wake and sleep that suggest that while interference is uniformly destabilizing of WPT memories during wake, interference after REM show effects on the memory trace formed during initial learning that are distinctly different from its effects on the subsequently sleep-enhanced memory.

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