memory – GOLLYGEE!

Sleeping seems to enhance memory moreso for kids than adults. In a study children were able to turn implicit knowledge in to explicit knowledge at a higher rate than adults after 10-12 hours of sleep.

Popular Science offers this blurb on a study from Nature Neuroscience:

As a child, you sleep more deeply than an adult, and experience three times more slow-wave sleep and higher electrical activity in the brain during that sleep. This may help turn the large amount of information you accumulate during the day into knowledge you can recall intentionally.

The study, published in Nature Neuroscience this week, looked at 35 children between 8 and 11 years old, as well as 37 adults between 18 and 35. They were each asked to quickly press a sequence of buttons after they lit up. Half of them performed the activity before sleep, and half after. They were then asked to recall the sequence of the eight lights 10 to 12 hours later.

After sleeping, almost all of the children turned the implicit knowledge into explicitly and could remember the sequence they had pressed perfectly, while adults experienced smaller gains. Both groups remembered the sequence better after sleep than those who were asked to recall it right after their training.

A study of honeybees has shown that a lack of sleep impairs their ability to recall recent events. From Scientific American:

After characterizing how honeybees find their way home when released in a new location, the scientists captured and then released bees in unfamiliar territory some 600 meters from their hive. In addition to tracking how long the bees needed to return home, the researchers monitored bee sleep. Bees take brief naps throughout the day in addition to longer periods of nocturnal sleep. (Snoozing bees are easy to spot because their antennae droop.) The scientists made their observations both by watching bees in person and by tracking their activity via radio-frequency devices that they glued onto some of the insects.

The researchers verified first that finding a new route home did not alter other foraging behaviors, although it did lead to an increase in sleeping time in the first part of the night. Curious as to whether this change might reflect some learning or memory process, the team decided to see what happens when bee slumber is disturbed by selectively placing the insects in a box that was gently agitated for about eight hours, making it difficult for them to relax and get a good night’s sleep.

The next day the researchers found that sleepless bees and well-rested ones performed no differently when left to find their way home from a novel location. In other words, lack of sleep apparently did not inhibit the bees’ learning processes. “This suggests that there are forms of learning that seem to be totally independent of sleep,” Menzel says.

The scientists observed, however, a significant and obvious difference when bees were brought to the new spot for a second day. This time, bees that had slept well found their way home faster and fewer got lost along the way than on the previous day. That observation indicates that the well-rested bees had learned from their experience the day before. Drowsy bees, however, took about as long to return home on the second day as on the first, and were just as likely to get lost.

The study appears in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

GOLLYGEE!

Tag: memory

sleeping enhances memory more in children than adults

lack of sleep can effect memory