More Forgetful as You Get Older? Get Better (Slow-Wave) Sleep

A primary component of cognitive decline with aging is decreased retention of new information that is presented episodically (episodic memory). Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging and polysomnography to examine the relationship between this problem and the amount of non-REM slow-wave sleep (SWS), which promotes the transfer of episodic representations from a hippocampal-dependent state to a hippocampal-independent one less likely to be disrupted by new hippocampal-dependent information.

Cognitively normal older and younger adults (15 and 18 participants, respectively; mean ages, 72 and 20) were presented with pairs of actual words (e.g., “bird”) and nonsense words (e.g., “jubu”) and then were asked to recognize the association after …