Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.
Sci Rep. 2017 Oct 11;7(1):12936. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-13278-3.
Sleep spindles are phasic bursts of thalamo-cortical activity, visible in the cortex as transient oscillations in the sigma range (usually defined in humans as 12-14 or 9-16 Hz). They have been associated with sleep-dependent memory consolidation and sleep stability in humans and rodents. Occurrence, frequency, amplitude and duration of sleep spindles co-vary with age, sex and psychiatric conditions. Spindle analogue activity in dogs has been qualitatively described, but never quantified and related to function. In the present study we used an adjusted version of a detection method previously validated in children to test whether detections in the dogs show equivalent functional correlates as described in the human literature. We found that the density of EEG transients in the 9-16 Hz range during non-REM sleep relates to memory and is characterized by sexual dimorphism similarly as in humans. The number of transients/minute was larger in the learning condition and for female dogs, and correlated with the increase of performance during recall. It can be concluded that in dogs, automatic detections in the 9-16 Hz range, in particular the slow variant (<13 Hz), are functional analogues of human spindles.
睡眠纺锤波是丘脑-皮层活动的阶段性爆发，在皮层中表现为 sigma 范围（通常在人类中定义为 12-14 或 9-16 Hz）的短暂振荡。它们与人类和啮齿动物的睡眠依赖记忆巩固和睡眠稳定性有关。睡眠纺锤波的发生、频率、幅度和持续时间随年龄、性别和精神状况而变化。狗的纺锤波类似活动已被定性描述，但从未被定量描述并与功能相关。在本研究中，我们使用了一种以前在儿童中验证过的检测方法的调整版本，来测试在狗身上的检测是否具有与人类文献中描述的等效功能相关性。我们发现，非快速眼动睡眠期间，脑电图中 9-16 Hz 范围内的瞬态密度与记忆有关，并且与人类相似，表现出性别二态性。每分钟的瞬态数量在学习条件下和雌性狗中更大，并且与回忆过程中的表现增加相关。可以得出结论，在狗中，9-16 Hz 范围内的自动检测，特别是慢变体（<13 Hz），是人类纺锤波的功能类似物。
