Abstract
The role of sleep in memory and skill-learning processes is an important and widely debated issue. The current study explores the nature of the relationship between sleep and off-line improvement in three tasks for measuring different aspects of skill learning: the serial reaction time (SRT) task, which is a motor sequence learning task; the artificial grammar learning (AGL) task, testing abstract verbal sequence learning; and the weather prediction (WP) task, which is a non-sequential categorization task. Each participant was tested on one of the three tasks twice, either in a Wake condition (with a 12-h off-line period without sleep), or in a Sleep condition (with sleep). Results showed no sleep-related off-line improvement throughout the three tasks in a two-session re-learning design, but a sleep-independent time-based effect was found on the SRT task. No performance boost was observed in the WP and AGL tasks. Performance on the SRT showed a time of the day effect: the Sleep group outperforming the Wake group; however, this effect was restricted to overall response latencies. Taken together, no evidence was found in favor of sleep-dependent off-line enhancement in skill learning, but methodological concerns warrant further investigations.
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Notes
Previous studies using the SRT task applied this same design, that is, the same session repeated twice (e.g., Meier and Cock 2014; Nemeth et al. 2010). On the other hand, earlier studies of the AGL and WP tasks employed only a test phase in Session 2: For the cited WP task, the test session was a short session without feedback (Djonlagic et al. 2009), while for AGL, it was a familiarity decision for statistically constrained and unconstrained sequences (Durrant et al. 2011). That is, no further learning could have occurred in the testing phase in these cases.
Due to sphericity violations, Huynh–Feldt corrections were used for Block and Session × Block effects.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Karolina Janacsek and Dezső Németh for their comments on the manuscript. We thank Kata Fazekas for her help in data collection. During the publication process, Ferenc Kemény was a Sciex NMS-CH postdoctoral fellow (14.120, “MUST–Multimodal Sequence Learning”).
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Handling Editor: Paul Verhaeghen, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Reviewers: Darlene Howard, Georgetown University; Timothy Rickard, UC San Diego.
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Kemény, F., Lukács, Á. Sleep-independent off-line enhancement and time of the day effects in three forms of skill learning. Cogn Process 17, 163–174 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-016-0750-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-016-0750-0