Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Sleep, The City College of the City University of New York, 138th Street and Convent Ave., New York, NY 10031, USA.
Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2010 May;93(4):554-60. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2010.02.003. Epub 2010 Feb 20.
Sleep facilitates declarative memory processing. However, we know little about whether sleep plays a role in the processing of a fundamental feature of declarative memory, relational memory - the flexible representation of items not directly learned prior to sleep. Thirty-one healthy participants first learned at 12 pm two sets of face-object photograph pairs (direct associative memory), in which the objects in each pair were common to both lists, but paired with two different faces. Participants either were given approximately 90 min to have a NREM-only daytime nap (n=14) or an equivalent waking period (n=17). At 4:30 pm, participants who napped demonstrated significantly better retention of direct associative memory, as well as better performance on a surprise task assessing their relational memory, in which participants had to associate the two faces previously paired with the same object during learning. Particularly noteworthy, relational memory performance was correlated with the amount of NREM sleep during the nap, with only slow-wave sleep predicting relational memory performance. Sleep stage data did not correlate with direct associative memory retention. These results suggest an active role for sleep in facilitating multiple processes that are not limited to the mere strengthening of rote memories, but also the binding of items that were not directly learned together, reorganizing them for flexible use at a later time.
睡眠有助于陈述性记忆处理。然而，我们对于睡眠是否在处理陈述性记忆的一个基本特征——关系记忆中发挥作用知之甚少——关系记忆是指灵活地表示在睡眠前没有直接学习过的项目。31 名健康参与者首先在中午 12 点学习了两组人脸-物体照片对（直接联想记忆），其中每组的物体在两个列表中都很常见，但与两张不同的脸配对。参与者要么被安排大约 90 分钟进行非快速眼动（NREM）日间小睡（n=14），要么进行等效的清醒期（n=17）。下午 4 点 30 分，小睡的参与者在直接联想记忆方面表现出明显更好的保留，并且在一项评估他们关系记忆的惊喜任务中表现更好，在该任务中，参与者必须在学习期间将先前与同一物体配对的两张脸联系起来。特别值得注意的是，关系记忆表现与小睡期间的 NREM 睡眠量相关，只有慢波睡眠预测关系记忆表现。睡眠阶段数据与直接联想记忆保留无关。这些结果表明，睡眠在促进多种过程中发挥了积极作用，这些过程不仅限于简单地加强机械记忆，还包括将没有直接一起学习的项目进行绑定，以便以后灵活使用。
