Wamsley Erin J, Trost Tempest, Tucker Matthew
Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience, Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA.
Sleep Adv. 2024 Dec 18;5(1):zpae096. doi: 10.1093/sleepadvances/zpae096. eCollection 2024.
Robert Stickgold's research was among the earliest to rigorously quantify the effect of learning on dream content. As a result, we learned that dreaming is influenced by the activation of newly formed memory traces in the sleeping brain. Exactly how this happens is an ongoing area of investigation. Here, we test the hypothesis that participants are especially likely to dream of recent experiences, which overlap with well-established semantic networks. We created an artificial situation in which participants encountered new information about a person with which they have extensive past experience-a favorite celebrity. We tracked the effect of novel information about a favorite celebrity on participants' dream content across 3 consecutive nights and queried participants about other recent and remote memory sources of their dreams. While the celebrity manipulation failed to affect dream content, this dataset provides rich descriptive information about how recent and remote memory fragments are incorporated into dreams, and how multiple memory sources combine to create bizarre, imaginative scenarios. We discuss these observations in light of the proposed "memory updating" function of sleep-dependent memory consolidation, as well as Stickgold and Zadra's NEXTUP (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities) model of dreaming. This paper is part of the Festschrift in honor of Dr Robert Stickgold.
罗伯特·斯蒂克戈尔德的研究是最早对学习对梦境内容的影响进行严格量化的研究之一。因此，我们了解到，做梦会受到睡眠大脑中新形成的记忆痕迹激活的影响。具体是如何发生的仍是一个正在进行研究的领域。在此，我们检验这样一个假设：参与者特别容易梦到与已建立的语义网络重叠的近期经历。我们创造了一种人工情境，让参与者接触到关于一个他们有丰富过往经历的人的新信息——一位他们喜爱的名人。我们在连续三个晚上跟踪了关于喜爱名人的新信息对参与者梦境内容的影响，并询问参与者关于他们梦境的其他近期和遥远的记忆来源。虽然对名人的操控未能影响梦境内容，但这个数据集提供了丰富的描述性信息，关于近期和遥远的记忆片段是如何融入梦境的，以及多个记忆来源是如何结合起来创造出奇异、富有想象力的场景的。我们根据睡眠依赖记忆巩固的“记忆更新”功能提议，以及斯蒂克戈尔德和扎德拉的“NEXTUP”（理解可能性的网络探索）梦境模型来讨论这些观察结果。本文是为纪念罗伯特·斯蒂克戈尔德博士而作的纪念文集的一部分。
