Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center / Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Aug 2;16(8):e0255423. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255423. eCollection 2021.
Extracting shared structure across our experiences allows us to generalize our knowledge to novel contexts. How do different brain states influence this ability to generalize? Using a novel category learning paradigm, we assess the effect of both sleep and time of day on generalization that depends on the flexible integration of recent information. Counter to our expectations, we found no evidence that this form of generalization is better after a night of sleep relative to a day awake. Instead, we observed an effect of time of day, with better generalization in the morning than the evening. This effect also manifested as increased false memory for generalized information. In a nap experiment, we found that generalization did not benefit from having slept recently, suggesting a role for time of day apart from sleep. In follow-up experiments, we were unable to replicate the time of day effect for reasons that may relate to changes in category structure and task engagement. Despite this lack of consistency, we found a morning benefit for generalization when analyzing all the data from experiments with matched protocols (n = 136). We suggest that a state of lowered inhibition in the morning may facilitate spreading activation between otherwise separate memories, promoting this form of generalization.
从我们的经验中提取共同的结构可以使我们将知识推广到新的情境中。不同的大脑状态如何影响这种泛化能力？使用一种新的类别学习范式，我们评估了睡眠和一天中的时间对依赖于最近信息灵活整合的泛化的影响。与我们的预期相反，我们没有发现相对于清醒一天，一晚上的睡眠后这种泛化形式会更好的证据。相反，我们观察到了时间的影响，早上的泛化比晚上好。这种效应也表现为对泛化信息的错误记忆增加。在小睡实验中，我们发现最近睡眠并没有使泛化受益，这表明时间的影响与睡眠无关。在后续的实验中，由于可能与类别结构和任务参与的变化有关，我们无法复制时间的影响。尽管缺乏一致性，但我们在分析所有具有匹配方案的实验数据（n = 136）时发现了泛化的早晨益处。我们认为，早上抑制状态的降低可能会促进在否则彼此分离的记忆之间进行扩散激活，从而促进这种泛化形式。
