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Growing evidence suggests that non-REM (NREM) sleep contributes to the consolidation of declarative memory. Studies have shown that declarative memory, which is hippocampus-dependent, benefits particularly from slow-wave sleep, whereas procedural memory is improved by REM sleep. In this study, researchers explored whether factors that alter the extent of task acquisition modulate subsequent sleep-related declarative-memory processing.
The authors recruited 33 young subjects to practice three declarative-memory tasks (learning pairs of semantically unrelated words, copying an image, and completing a visual maze). Of 60 pairs of words, 20 pairs were retested during training to enhance acquisition. The subjects were then assigned to either a na…