Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

There is now substantial evidence that sleep consolidates (i.e., strengthens and stabilizes) memory. More recent research is now extending this knowledge to observe which aspects of memory sleep might benefit the most. Memory can be divided into declarative (e.g., remembering facts and past events) and procedural (e.g., learning and carrying out the ideal moves to win a game of chess). Procedural memory can be further differentiated into its motor components, and its strategy components. Our recent research found that sleep benefited the strategy of learning a procedural memory task more so than it benefited the simple motor movements when performing that same task. We are now expanding on these findings to identify which sleep stages are responsible for the strategy learning component, and how these sleep stages might relate to the brain regions that are activated while performing the task prior to sleep.