Sleep Preferentially Enhances Memory for Emotional Components of Scenes
By Jessica D. Payne, Robert Stickgold, Kelley M. Swanberg, Elizabeth A. Kensinger. 2008
444 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Central aspects of emotional experiences are often well remembered at the expense of background details. Previous studies of such memory trade-offs have focused on memory after brief delays, but little is known about how these components of emotional memories change over time. We investigated the evolution of memory for negative scenes across 30 min, 12 daytime hours spent awake, and 12 nighttime hours including sleep. After 30 min, negative objects were well remembered at the expense of information about their backgrounds. Time spent awake led to forgetting of the entire negative scene, with memories of objects and their backgrounds decaying at similar rates. Sleep, in contrast, led to a preservation of memories of negative objects, but not their backgrounds, a result suggesting that the two components undergo differential processing during sleep. Memory for a negative scene develops differentially across time delays containing sleep and wake, with sleep selectively consolidating those aspects of memory that are of greatest value to the organism.
Subfields: Computer Science Applications, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
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Citations in the corpus
- Replay in Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Missing Biological Elements (2021, neutral): “Consolidation of the hippocampus independent short-term memory, such as emotional and procedural memory, is also enhanced by sleep (McGaugh, 2000; Hu, Stylos-Allan, & Walker, 2006; Payne, Stickgold, Swan-berg, & Kensinger, 2008; Wagner et al., 2001).”
- Sleep‐dependent selective imitation in infants (2019, background): “, a street scene), sleep specifically contributes to the preservation of the memory for the emotional central element, but not for the background (Payne et al., 2008).”
- Evidence for the preferential incorporation of emotional waking-life experiences into dreams. (2014, background): “Additionally, it has been shown that sleep ‘unbinds’ the emotional elements of memories for selective consolidation (Payne et al., 2008), again demonstrating how emotions seem to guide the process of determining which memories are chosen for encoding during sleep.”
- Sleep for cognitive enhancement (2014, background): “For example, sleep increases memory for emotional components of a scene but concurrently decreases memory for the neutral background (Payne et al., 2008, 2012a; Payne and Kensinger, 2010, 2011).”
- Processing of emotional reactivity and emotional memory over sleep (2012, unknown): “Emotional but not neutral memories show enhanced consolidation over a full night of sleep compared with an equivalent interval of wake (Hu et al., 2006; Payne et al., 2008).”