Sleep, learning, and memory consolidation – Flashcards

found that the test performance of Harvard students was based most off of how much they slept the night before

taught a task, then either immediately tested or tested after sleep- there is consistently a little boost in performance in the sleep subjects. It is the first night after learning that's most important. This holds true regardless of time of day the training occurs at. Not necessarily REM sleep.

courtship experiment: pair female with a male who was marked with a specific scent. then you separate them, then put them back together- she should be more receptive to his advances than to those of a new male fly, because she is familiar with him. resting helped with learning this pairing. (they increased the temp to induce sleep- knew the flies weren't dead because they gave them caffeine). If the waking temp was the same, the effect of sleep was not seen.

if you stimulate frontal lobe, EEG was more intense and they performed better on the word association task- they had been in a deeper sleep. problem: they tested them in the AM so the results may be attributable to circadian rhythm effects.

infants were able to learn eye movement conditioning during sleep so maybe sleep is not entirely an amnesic activity.