Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
J Neurosci. 2010 Jan 13;30(2):609-13. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4237-09.2010.
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.
记忆巩固被广泛认为受益于睡眠。睡眠依赖的记忆巩固在人类中得到了广泛的证实，出现在陈述性和程序性任务中。动物研究表明，有多种潜在的机制可以作为睡眠依赖巩固的神经基础，例如清醒时神经活动的离线回放，以及睡眠期间特定睡眠参数或突触强度的调节。然而，记忆巩固不能仅从神经元事件推断出来，并且动物中睡眠依赖巩固的行为表现受到限制。在这里，我们研究了成年动物是否经历了与人类相当的睡眠依赖记忆巩固。欧洲椋鸟（Sturnus vulgaris）接受了区分新颖椋鸟歌声片段的训练，并在包括正常睡眠夜或仅清醒的保留期后进行了重新测试。在包括睡眠的保留期后，听觉辨别性能显著提高，但在清醒时间后则没有提高，并且睡眠后发生的性能变化明显大于可比的清醒时间后。因此，睡眠在成年椋鸟中产生了一种记忆益处模式，与在人类中观察到的睡眠依赖巩固模式基本相似，这表明跨许多脊椎动物物种起作用的共同睡眠依赖机制可用于巩固记忆，并为这一现象建立了一个强大的动物模型。
