Department of Adult Mental Health, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Tokyo 187-8502, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2011;1:127. doi: 10.1038/srep00127. Epub 2011 Oct 24.
Working memory (WM) capacity improvement is impacted by sleep, and possibly by N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) agonists such as D-cycloserine (DCS), which also affects procedural skill performance. However, the mechanisms behind these relationships are not well understood. In order to investigate the neural basis underlying relationships between WM skill learning and sleep, DCS, and both sleep and DCS together, we evaluated training-retest performances in the n-back task among healthy subjects who were given either a placebo or DCS before the task training, and then followed task training sessions either with wakefulness or sleep. DCS facilitated WM capacity enhancement only occurring after a period of wakefulness, rather than sleep, indicating that WM capacity enhancement is affected by a cellular heterogeneity in synaptic plasticity between time spent awake and time spent asleep. These findings may contribute to development, anti-aging processes, and rehabilitation of higher cognition.
工作记忆 (WM) 能力的提高受到睡眠的影响，可能还受到 N-甲基-D-天冬氨酸 (NMDA) 激动剂的影响，如 D-环丝氨酸 (DCS)，它也会影响程序性技能表现。然而，这些关系背后的机制还不是很清楚。为了研究 WM 技能学习与睡眠、DCS 以及睡眠和 DCS 共同作用之间的关系的神经基础，我们评估了健康受试者在接受安慰剂或 DCS 预处理后进行 n-back 任务的训练-再测试表现，然后在清醒或睡眠状态下进行任务训练。只有在清醒一段时间后，而不是睡眠后，DCS 才会促进 WM 能力的提高，这表明 WM 能力的提高受到清醒和睡眠之间突触可塑性的细胞异质性的影响。这些发现可能有助于发展、抗衰老过程和更高认知的康复。
