Daytime Sleep Enhances Consolidation of the Spatial but Not Motoric Representation of Motor Sequence Memory

By Geneviève Albouy, Stuart M. Fogel, Hugo Pottiez, Vo An Nguyen, Laura Ray, Ovidiu V. Lungu, J. Carrier, Edwin M Robertson, Julien Doyon. 2013

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motor sequence learning is known to rely on more than a single process. As the skill develops with practice, two different representations of the sequence are formed: a goal representation built under spatial allocentric coordinates and a movement representation mediated through egocentric motor coordinates. This study aimed to explore the influence of daytime sleep (nap) on consolidation of these two representations. Through the manipulation of an explicit finger sequence learning task and a transfer protocol, we show that both allocentric (spatial) and egocentric (motor) representations of the sequence can be isolated after initial training. Our results also demonstrate that nap favors the emergence of offline gains in performance for the allocentric, but not the egocentric representation, even after accounting for fatigue effects. Furthermore, sleep-dependent gains in performance observed for the allocentric representation are correlated with spindle density during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep of the post-training nap. In contrast, performance on the egocentric representation is only maintained, but not improved, regardless of the sleep/wake condition. These results suggest that motor sequence memory acquisition and consolidation involve distinct mechanisms that rely on sleep (and specifically, spindle) or simple passage of time, depending respectively on whether the sequence is performed under allocentric or egocentric coordinates.

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, positive): “Sleep improves motor sequence learning (Walker, Stickgold, Alsop, Gaab, & Schlaug, 2005; Walker, Brakefield, Morgan, Hobson, & Stickgold, 2002), motor adaptation (Stick-gold, 2005), and goal-related sequence tasks (Albouy et al., 2013; Cohen, Pascual-Leone, Press, & Robertson, 2005).”
Strengthening Procedural Memories by Reactivation in Sleep (2014, background): “…has been shown that the interaction between the hippocampal and striatal systems during training predicts the subsequent consolidation of a finger-tapping task (Albouy, Sterpenich, et al., 2013) and that caudate activity increases when task performance becomes more consistent (Albouy et al., 2012).”
Sleeping on the motor engram: The multifaceted nature of sleep‐related motor memory consolidation (2017, unknown): “…2007; Urbain et al., 2013) and that there are multiple instances of sleep-dependent consolidation in non-sequence tasks such as motor adaptation (Albouy et al., 2013d; Backhaus and Junghanns, 2006; Huber et al., 2004; Javadi et al., 2011; Mantua et al., 2015; Plihal and Born, 1997; Schönauer et…”