Off-Line Processing: Reciprocal Interactions between Declarative and Procedural Memories

By Rachel M. Brown, Edwin M Robertson. 2007

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The acquisition of declarative (i.e., facts) and procedural (i.e., skills) memories may be supported by independent systems. This same organization may exist, after memory acquisition, when memories are processed off-line during consolidation. Alternatively, memory consolidation may be supported by interactive systems. This latter interactive organization predicts interference between declarative and procedural memories. Here, we show that procedural consolidation, expressed as an off-line motor skill improvement, can be blocked by declarative learning over wake, but not over a night of sleep. The extent of the blockade on procedural consolidation was correlated to participants' declarative word recall. Similarly, in another experiment, the reciprocal relationship was found: declarative consolidation was blocked by procedural learning over wake, but not over a night of sleep. The decrease in declarative recall was correlated to participants' procedural learning. These results challenge the concept of fixed independent memory systems; instead, they suggest a dynamic relationship, modulated by when consolidation takes place, allowing at times for a reciprocal interaction between memory systems.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Replay in Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Missing Biological Elements (2021, neutral): “Sleep has also been shown to prevent interference between procedural and declarative tasks (Brown & Robertson, 2007), suggesting a role for sleep in preventing interference during consolidation of different memory types.”
About sleep's role in memory. (2013, background): “, a gain in skill at a later retesting) have pointed towards an active reprocessing of skill representations occurring during sleep that sharpens the respective representations (47, 57, 147, 274, 275, 291, 322, 383, 384, 433, 582, 622, 631, 664, 665, 679, 762, 770, 808, 810, 863, 930, 1003, 1153, 11”
Sleeping on the motor engram: The multifaceted nature of sleep‐related motor memory consolidation (2017, unknown): “In a seminal line of research, Brown and Robertson (2007) demonstrated that a declarative memory task interfered with procedural memory consolidation (i.e., implicit sequence learning), and vice versa, over wake but not over sleep.”
Daytime Sleep Enhances Consolidation of the Spatial but Not Motoric Representation of Motor Sequence Memory (2013, background): “We speculate that in our study, the declarative knowledge for the sequence may specifically block the egocentric component of the motor skill preventing improvements from developing over wakefulness [9,21,54,55].”
The memory function of sleep (2010, background): “This idea derives mainly from experiments showing that declarative learning of words immediately after training of a procedural skill can block off-line improvement in that skill if the subject does not sleep between learning and re-testing, but not if the subject sleeps between learning and re-test”