Sleep-dependent learning and motor-skill complexity.

By K. Kuriyama, Robert Stickgold, Matthew P. Walker. 2004

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Learning of a procedural motor-skill task is known to progress through a series of unique memory stages. Performance initially improves during training, and continues to improve, without further rehearsal, across subsequent periods of sleep. Here, we investigate how this delayed sleep-dependent learning is affected when the task characteristics are varied across several degrees of difficulty, and whether this improvement differentially enhances individual transitions of the motor-sequence pattern being learned. We report that subjects show similar overnight improvements in speed whether learning a five-element unimanual sequence (17.7% improvement), a nine-element unimanual sequence (20.2%), or a five-element bimanual sequence (17.5%), but show markedly increased overnight improvement (28.9%) with a nine-element bimanual sequence. In addition, individual transitions within the motor-sequence pattern that appeared most difficult at the end of training showed a significant 17.8% increase in speed overnight, whereas those transitions that were performed most rapidly at the end of training showed only a non-significant 1.4% improvement. Together, these findings suggest that the sleep-dependent learning process selectively provides maximum benefit to motor-skill procedures that proved to be most difficult prior to sleep.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Replay in Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Missing Biological Elements (2021, neutral): “…(Walker & Stickgold, 2010): (1) it unitizes distinct memories for easier storage (Haskins et al., 2008; Bader et al., 2010; Tibon et al., 2014; Kuriyama, Stickgold, & Walker, 2004; Ellenbogen, Hu, Payne, Titone, & Walker, 2007), (2) assimilates new memories into existing networks (Walker,…”
About sleep's role in memory. (2013, background): “In adults, the level of skill performance at learning has repeatedly been demonstrated to modulate sleep-dependent memory consolidation, whereby benefits from sleep appeared to be most robust with intermediate performance levels (16, 297, 679, 1151).”
Sleep enhances category learning. (2009, result): “A similar pattern, showing greater sleep-dependent benefits with poorer initial performance, has been reported for a finger-tapping motor sequence task (Kuriyama et al. 2004).”
Daytime Naps, Motor Memory Consolidation and Regionally Specific Sleep Spindles (2007, result): “Moreover, the magnitude of enhancement we observed across the nap period was similar to the amount of improvement normally expressed following an entire night of sleep [4,14,17,18,28].”
The memory function of sleep (2010, background): “The benefit of sleep is greater for memories formed from explicitly encoded information that was more difficult to encode or that was only weakly encode”
Sleep-dependent memory consolidation and reconsolidation. (2007, background): “5E), possibly reflecting a reduced need for conscious spatial monitoring [71–73] due to improved task automation [43], together with regions of signal decrease throughout the limbic system (Fig.”
Overnight Alchemy: Sleep-dependent Memory Evolution (2010, background): “For example, overnight unitization has been observed in a sequential finger-tapping motor skill tas”
Sleep-dependent memory consolidation (2005, background): “Aside from the fact that motor skills form the basis of dance and music, distinctly human forms of expression, and that more complex motor learning shows more sleep-dependent improvemen”
Sleeping on the motor engram: The multifaceted nature of sleep‐related motor memory consolidation (2017, positive): “Kuriyama et al. (2004) demonstrated larger overnight enhancements in performance when the motor sequence that was explicitly learned was longer and performed bimanually, as compared to a shorter and unimanual sequence.”
The contribution of sleep to hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation. (2007, background): “Once explicitly encoded, the consolidating effect of sleep is greater for weakly than strongly encoded associations [ 22 ,23] and, in episodic memories, selective for the forward temporal sequence [24].”
Sleep-dependent motor memory plasticity in the human brain. (2005, positive): “…by enhanced sequence planning in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, which in addition to the increased striate activity (Doyon et al., 2003), facilitates the construction of more efficient motor-sequence patterns required for optimizing within-sequence transitions (Kuriyama et al., 2004).”