Learning Paradigms: The Effects of Sleep & Wake on Visumotor Task Consolidation

Abstract

Sleep has been shown to have a significant impact on memory consolidation. Specially, studies have shown that slow-wave sleep (SWS), occurring mainly during early stages of sleep, help improve declarative memory, and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, occurring mainly during late sleep, help improve procedural memory. Taken together, accuracy and precision on motor learning tasks, consisting of both implicit and explicit components, benefit from different stages of sleep. This paper directly focuses on understanding how strategic processes (explicit learning) interact with an implicit system, asking how the recruitment of these processes can be altered by sleep and wake, and how they contribute to overall motor learning in successive trials. By manipulating time and activity between trials, we will analyze the way in which these processes inuence successive learning and thus operate in our daily lives. Key words: adaptation; consolidation; explicit; implicit; motor learning; sleep; strategy; wake.