NSF-BSF: Reactivation and sleep in visual and motor skill acquisition: learning beyond training

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What is the best way to learn new skills? Recent studies have revealed two ways in which learning can become faster and more efficient. Previous research has shown that after practicing a motor skill fully on the first day of training, you only need to do a few practice trials on the following days to "reactivate" what you have learned, in order to achieve the same amount of skill improvement as if you had practiced the skill fully every day. How such brief task reactivation facilitates learning remains enigmatic. Other studies have shown how sleep also helps with learning visual skills. The goal of this research project is to integrate these important findings, explore whether sleep after skill training enhances learning and to understand the neural basis of how memory reactivation and sleep work together to make skill learning more efficient. In this collaborative US-Israel project, researchers investigate the neural mechanisms by which learning can be enhanced for both visual and motor skill learning and study whether offline processing during sleep compensates for the minimal amount of training (by only a few trials of task reactivation) during wakefulness. In addition to monitoring the learning progress of the participants in the study, their brain activity during sleep and their brain neurochemistry will also be measured. Specifically, this study examines neurochemical processing related to brain plasticity by non-invasively measuring a ratio between excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters in the brain (E/I ratio) using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The results may reveal how brief exposure to learned information via task reactivation can replace extensive training, uncover the basic behavioral and brain mechanisms linking task reactivation and sleep, and use that knowledge to develop better methods for more efficient sensory and motor skill learning.This project is jointly funded by the Cognitive Neuroscience Program, and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.