The effect of sleep on the consolidation of declarative and procedural memory.
Item
-
Title
-
The effect of sleep on the consolidation of declarative and procedural memory.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3245050
-
identifier
-
3245050
-
Creator
-
Tucker, Matthew A.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: William Fishbein
-
Date
-
2007
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Psychology, Psychobiology | Psychology, Cognitive
-
Abstract
-
The following three studies set out to examine the effect of sleep on memory with an emphasis on the effect of NREM sleep on declarative memory. The design of each study is largely behavioral with attempts to relate memory performance to relevant EEG correlates when possible. The first study is a replication of a study by Plihal & Born (1997) using a daytime nap design that eliminates the effects of sleep deprivation and assesses memory after a sleep episode containing only NREM sleep. We were able to replicate their findings by showing that NREM sleep facilitates processing of declarative memory (paired associates) while having no effect on procedural memory (mirror tracing). The second study expands on these finding by examining the effect of a daytime nap on three declarative memory tasks that either carry a strong semantic loading (unrelated paired associates) or lack semantic value (spatial maze learning and complex figure drawing). We found a sleep-dependent facilitation of performance for the paired associates task, but not for the non-semantic tasks. However, for all three tasks there was a marked sleep-dependent effect if subjects strongly encoded the information prior to sleep, suggesting that sleep may better process well-learned information while having little effect on weakly encoded information. The last study employs a nocturnal sleep design to assess the effect of sleep duration (3.5 v. 7.5 hours of sleep) on performance on a declarative (related paired associates) and a motor (number sequence learning) learning task. The subject variable intelligence is also assessed as a potential modulator of the effect of sleep on memory. We found that improvement in performance on both tasks after sleep was almost identical for both sleep groups and, surprisingly, this improvement is identical to improvements shown to occur following a short daytime nap (Tucker et al., 2006; Nishida & Walker, 2006). It was shown that intelligence was positively correlated with encoding and retest performance, but not with improvement following sleep, suggesting that while more intelligent subjects demonstrate greater encoding facility, encoding strength under these conditions does not lead to enhanced sleep-related memory performance.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
