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Sleep Supports Memory of Odors in Adults but Not in Children - PubMed

  • ️Thu Jan 01 2015

Sleep Supports Memory of Odors in Adults but Not in Children

Alexander Prehn-Kristensen et al. PLoS One. 2015.

Abstract

Sleep supports the consolidation of declarative memory in children and adults. However, it is unclear whether sleep improves odor memory in children as well as adults. Thirty healthy children (mean age of 10.6, ranging from 8-12 yrs.) and 30 healthy adults (mean age of 25.4, ranging from 20-30 yrs.) participated in an incidental odor recognition paradigm. While learning of 10 target odorants took place in the evening and retrieval (10 target and 10 distractor odorants) the next morning in the sleep groups (adults: n = 15, children: n = 15), the time schedule was vice versa in the wake groups (n = 15 each). During encoding, adults rated odors as being more familiar. After the retention interval, adult participants of the sleep group recognized odors better than adults in the wake group. While children in the wake group showed memory performance comparable to the adult wake group, the children sleep group performed worse than adult and children wake groups. Correlations between memory performance and familiarity ratings during encoding indicate that pre-experiences might be critical in determining whether sleep improves or worsens memory consolidation.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Odor recognition accuracy (d´) of the adult (black) and children (white) sleep and wake group; M, mean; SEM, standard error of means, *, p < .05; **, p < .01; ***, p = .001.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Correlations between familiarity ratings during encoding session and odor recognition accuracy during retrieval session; black symbols and solid regression line refer to the sleep groups [containing children (triangles) and adult (dots) data]; white symbols and the dashed line refer to the wake groups [(also containing children (triangles) and adult (dots) data].

Dotted lines refer to regression lines for the merged adult and for the merged children groups. Please note that correlation coefficients only differ significantly between the sleep and the wake groups (p = .023) but not between the children and the adult groups (p = .072).

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Grants and funding

This study was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 654 “Plasticity and Sleep” [http://www.sfb654.uni-luebeck.de/].