Sleep-dependent consolidation of auditory discrimination learning in adult starlings
By T. P. Brawn, Howard C. Nusbaum, D. Margoliash. 2010
50 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Memory consolidation is widely believed to benefit from sleep. Sleep-dependent memory consolidation has been established broadly in humans, appearing in declarative and procedural tasks. Animal studies have indicated a variety of mechanisms that could potentially serve as the neural basis of sleep-dependent consolidation, such as the offline replay of waking neural activity and the modulation of specific sleep parameters or synaptic strength during sleep. Memory consolidation, however, cannot be inferred from neuronal events alone, and the behavioral demonstration of sleep-dependent consolidation has been limited in animals. Here we investigated whether adult animals undergo sleep-dependent memory consolidation comparable to that of humans. European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were trained to discriminate between segments of novel starling song and retested after retention periods that included a regular night of sleep or consisted only of wakefulness. Auditory discrimination performance improved significantly after retention periods that included sleep but not after time spent awake, and the performance changes following sleep were significantly greater than after comparable periods of wakefulness. Thus, sleep produces a pattern of memory benefits in adult starlings that is fundamentally similar to the patterns of sleep-dependent consolidation observed in humans, suggesting a common sleep-dependent mechanism works across many vertebrate species to consolidate memories and establishing a robust animal model for this phenomenon.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Jan Born
- Björn H. Rasch
- Giulio Tononi
- Mohammad Rostami
- Susanne Diekelmann
- György Buzsáki
- Chiara Cirelli
- Maxim Bazhenov
Citations in the corpus
- About sleep's role in memory. (2013, background): “modifying sensorimotor representations, reactivations during sleep may also strengthen the song template (136).”