title: Consolidation of sensorimotor learning during sleep.
abstract: Consolidation of nondeclarative memory is widely believed to benefit from sleep. However, evidence is mainly limited to tasks involving rote learning of the same stimulus or behavior, and recent findings have questioned the extent of sleep-dependent consolidation. We demonstrate consolidation during sleep for a multimodal sensorimotor skill that was trained and tested in different visual-spatial virtual environments. Participants performed a task requiring the production of novel motor responses in coordination with continuously changing audio-visual stimuli. Performance improved with training, decreased following waking retention, but recovered and stabilized following sleep. These results extend the domain of sleep-dependent consolidation to more complex, adaptive behaviors.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA. tbrawn@uchicago.edu
authors.forename: Timothy P
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: Brawn
authors.forename: Kimberly M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Fenn
authors.forename: Howard C
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Nusbaum
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Margoliash
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D009048:Motor Skills / Q000502:physiology*; D012890:Sleep / Q000502:physiology*; D014851:Wakefulness / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult