title: Sleep enhances knowledge of routes and regions in spatial environments.
abstract: Sleep is thought to preferentially consolidate hippocampus-dependent memory, and as such, spatial navigation. Here, we investigated the effects of sleep on route knowledge and explicit and implicit semantic regions in a virtual environment. Sleep, compared with wakefulness, improved route knowledge and also enhanced awareness of the semantic regionalization within the environment, whereas signs of implicit regionalization remained unchanged. Results support the view that sleep specifically enhances explicit aspects of memory, also in the spatial domain. Enhanced region knowledge after sleep suggests that consolidation during sleep goes along with the formation of more abstract schema-like representations.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.|Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical School, University Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Hannes
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Noack
authors.affiliation: Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, University Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Wiebke
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Schick
authors.affiliation: Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, University Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Hanspeter
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Mallot
authors.affiliation: Institute for Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Born
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D012890:Sleep / Q000502:physiology*; D065854:Spatial Navigation / Q000502:physiology*; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014851:Wakefulness; D055815:Young Adult