Department of Psychology, The City College of the City University of New York, New York, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011;6(11):e27139. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027139. Epub 2011 Nov 16.
It is increasingly evident that sleep strengthens memory. However, it is not clear whether sleep promotes relational memory, resultant of the integration of disparate memory traces into memory networks linked by commonalities. The present study investigates the effect of a daytime nap, immediately after learning or after a delay, on a relational memory task that requires abstraction of general concept from separately learned items. Specifically, participants learned English meanings of Chinese characters with overlapping semantic components called radicals. They were later tested on new characters sharing the same radicals and on explicitly stating the general concepts represented by the radicals. Regardless of whether the nap occurred immediately after learning or after a delay, the nap participants performed better on both tasks. The results suggest that sleep--even as brief as a nap--facilitates the reorganization of discrete memory traces into flexible relational memory networks.
越来越明显的是，睡眠可以增强记忆。然而，目前尚不清楚睡眠是否促进关系记忆，即通过共性将不同的记忆痕迹整合到记忆网络中的结果。本研究调查了白天小睡（在学习后立即或延迟后）对关系记忆任务的影响，该任务要求从单独学习的项目中抽象出一般概念。具体来说，参与者学习了具有重叠语义成分的汉字的英文含义，这些汉字被称为偏旁部首。之后，他们接受了测试，测试内容是学习了相同偏旁部首的新汉字，以及明确陈述偏旁部首所代表的一般概念。无论小睡是在学习后立即发生还是在延迟后发生，小睡组在这两个任务上的表现都更好。结果表明，即使是短暂的小睡也有助于将离散的记忆痕迹重组为灵活的关系记忆网络。
