Centre for Research in Human Development and Learning, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, UK.
Mem Cognit. 2013 Feb;41(2):159-66. doi: 10.3758/s13421-012-0256-7.
Previous research has shown that performance on problem solving improves over a period of sleep, as compared with wakefulness. However, these studies have not determined whether sleep is beneficial for problem solving or whether sleep merely mitigates against interference due to an interruption to solution attempts. Sleep-dependent improvements have been described in terms of spreading activation, which raises the prediction that an effect of sleep should be greater for problems requiring a broader solution search. We presented participants with a set of remote-associate tasks that varied in difficulty as a function of the strength of the stimuli-answer associations. After a period of sleep, wake, or no delay, participants reattempted previously unsolved problems. The sleep group solved a greater number of difficult problems than did the other groups, but no difference was found for easy problems. We conclude that sleep facilitates problem solving, most likely via spreading activation, but this has its primary effect for harder problems.
先前的研究表明，与清醒状态相比，在一段时间的睡眠后，解决问题的表现会有所提高。然而，这些研究尚未确定睡眠是否对解决问题有益，或者睡眠是否仅仅缓解了因中断解决尝试而产生的干扰。睡眠依赖性的改善已被描述为扩散激活，这就提出了一个预测，即对于需要更广泛的解决方案搜索的问题，睡眠的影响应该更大。我们向参与者展示了一组远程联想任务，这些任务的难度随着刺激-答案关联的强度而变化。在一段时间的睡眠、醒来或没有延迟后，参与者重新尝试之前未解决的问题。与其他组相比，睡眠组解决了更多的难题，但对于简单的问题则没有发现差异。我们得出结论，睡眠有助于解决问题，这很可能是通过扩散激活来实现的，但这对更难的问题有主要影响。
