Daytime Naps, Motor Memory Consolidation and Regionally Specific Sleep Spindles

By Masaki Nishida, Matthew P. Walker. 2007

532 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Increasing evidence demonstrates that motor-skill memories improve across a night of sleep, and that non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep commonly plays a role in orchestrating these consolidation enhancements. Here we show the benefit of a daytime nap on motor memory consolidation and its relationship not simply with global sleep-stage measures, but unique characteristics of sleep spindles at regionally specific locations; mapping to the corresponding memory representation. Methodology/Principal Findings Two groups of subjects trained on a motor-skill task using their left hand – a paradigm known to result in overnight plastic changes in the contralateral, right motor cortex. Both groups trained in the morning and were tested 8 hr later, with one group obtaining a 60–90 minute intervening midday nap, while the other group remained awake. At testing, subjects that did not nap showed no significant performance improvement, yet those that did nap expressed a highly significant consolidation enhancement. Within the nap group, the amount of offline improvement showed a significant correlation with the global measure of stage-2 NREM sleep. However, topographical sleep spindle analysis revealed more precise correlations. Specifically, when spindle activity at the central electrode of the non-learning hemisphere (left) was subtracted from that in the learning hemisphere (right), representing the homeostatic difference following learning, strong positive relationships with offline memory improvement emerged–correlations that were not evident for either hemisphere alone. Conclusions/Significance These results demonstrate that motor memories are dynamically facilitated across daytime naps, enhancements that are uniquely associated with electrophysiological events expressed at local, anatomically discrete locations of the brain.

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): “Indeed, oscillatory activities during NREM stage 2 sleep, including sleep spindles and slow waves, are strongly correlated with motor sequence memory consolidation (Nishida & Walker, 2007; Barakat et al., 2013).”
The contribution of sleep to hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation. (2007, background): “learning [40,41]. Differential cortical distributions subsequent to learning a verbal versus visuospatial task have been reported [42, 74 ].”
Regional slow waves and spindles in human sleep. (2011, unknown): “…choice was guided by the fact that projections to the amygdala in primates aremostly ipsilateral and arrive from diverse sources, with a notable contribution from other limbic structures such as entorhinal cortex, cingulate cortex, and hippocampus, as well as medial prefrontal and orbitofrontal…”
Sleep for cognitive enhancement (2014, background): “Growth hormone, another important neuromodulator, had long been suspected to play a role in sleep-dependent memory consolidation as it is mainly secreted during SWS and is involved in hippocampal memory formation (Nyberg and Hallberg, 2013).”
The Role of Sleep in Cognition and Emotion (2009, background): “This increase in spindle activity may represent a local, endogenous trigger of intrinsic synaptic plasticity, again corresponding topographically to the underlying memory representation (Nishida & Walker 2007).”
Sleep spindle activity is associated with the integration of new memories and existing knowledge (2010, methodology): “This algorithm is similar to others and was also used by Nishida and Walker (2007).”
The memory function of sleep (2010, background): “Significant sleep benefits on memory are observed after an 8-hour night of sleep, but also after shorter naps of 1–2 hour”
Can sleep protect memories from catastrophic forgetting? (2019, unknown): “The amount of performance increase in the finger tapping task correlated with the amount of NREM sleep (Walker et al., 2002), spindle density (Nishida and Walker, 2007) and delta power (Tamaki et al., 2013).”
Schema-conformant memories are preferentially consolidated during REM sleep. (2015, unknown): “This algorithm takes the filtered signal and detects amplitude fluctuations of eight or more times the mean channel value and has been used in a number of previous studies (Cairney, Durrant, Hulleman, & Lewis, 2014; Nishida & Walker, 2007; Tamminen, Payne, Stickgold, Wamsley, & Gaskell, 2010).”
Daytime Sleep Enhances Consolidation of the Spatial but Not Motoric Representation of Motor Sequence Memory (2013, result): “They also agree with numerous investigations using classical motor sequence learning paradigms that are reporting a crucial role of spindles in this process during both nocturnal [32–35] and diurnal [26] sleep.”
Sleeping on the motor engram: The multifaceted nature of sleep‐related motor memory consolidation (2017, unknown): “, contralateral to the hand that performed the motor task) and the non-learning hemisphere was correlated with betweensession improvements on an explicit motor sequence task (Nishida and Walker, 2007).”