The Criticism Of Sleep And Memory Consolidation

In a 1973 study, Mary Janet Fowler, Micheal J. Sullivan and Bruce R. Ekstrand found that there was a higher retention of paired associate words when the subjects slept during the first half of the night than when they were awake during the day (Gais, Lucas & Born, 2006)

Criticism of Sleep and Memory Consolidation Findings

Though there are a number of studies that have found that sleep has an influence on memory consolidation, recently there has been new research conducted that raises questions about those findings. One issue that was brought up was that none of the previous studies could show that a lack of sleep had an enduring effect on memory consolidation that persists when retrieval testing is delayed until the subjects were able to have recovery sleep to make up for any effects of sleep deprivation. (Gais et al., 2006). Most recent studies have tested memory directly after the subject had had little sleep, because they were awakened multiple times throughout the night to be tested. Some argue that this showed that the decrease in memory retrieval after awakening showed impaired retrieval, and did not conclude that it was a significant effect on memory consolidation. Also, the results were questioned by other researchers who argued that because the subjects were required to learn and

In 2012, Daltrozzo, Claude, Tillmann, Bastuji and Perrin conducted the first study to explore working memory in regard to cognitive processes during sleep. In this study, they tested speech perception when the level of background noise and the sentential semantic length, the amount of semantic information that is required to perceive the incongruence of a sentence, were regulated. The results of their study suggested that working memory for linguistic information is partially preserved during sleep with a smaller capacity compared to