Does sleep flush out the unwanted leftovers of recent cognitive activities?

睡眠会清除近期认知活动中不必要的残留物吗？

• 批准号: ES/R006288/1
• 负责人: Nicolas Dumay
• 金额: $ 67.46万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2018 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FR006288%2F1
• 关键词: Does; sleep; flush; out; unwanted

This project examines whether sleep helps flush out unwanted leftovers of recent perceptual and cognitive activities in addition to consolidating new learning.Traditional views of learning assume that new memories are shaky for a while, but soon consolidate, becoming resistant to amnestic agents and interference from new learning (McGaugh, 2000; Wixted, 2004). Recent theorizing (Stickgold & Walker, 2013), however, insists that memory consolidation is not the uniform and indiscriminate process just described, but is instead highly selective and adaptive, tailored to the goal-directed needs of the organism.Sleep, with its associated neurophysiological states, is the prime vehicle for a "memory triage" process: only memories that are emotionally salient, or worth remembering for future use, get assimilated into the brain's landscape of ever evolving knowledge. Here we ask what happens to unwanted memories, which also start off in this no man's land of in between memory (i.e., between working memory and long-term memory; henceforth, IBM)? The goal of this project is to determine whether in addition to stabilizing and assimilating useful memories, sleep also cleans the slate of unwanted memories to reset the system, in order to start afresh the next day.Evidence for offline, sleep-dependent memory consolidation is substantial, showing a variety of transformative results, including increased resilience to amnestic agents, enhanced accessibility, spontaneous recovery, extraction of underlying structures, and integration with existing knowledge. In contrast, the existence of memory clean-up has not yet been substantiated. We suggest this is largely because researchers thought they could just force learners to forget newly learnt information.Our premise is that unwanted leftovers mostly comprise the lingering activation of long-term memories recently evoked by perceptual, expressive, or imagery-based experience. This activation accumulates records of involvement of a given memory over the course of a day. As such, this could influence rather insidiously how we behave during the next few hours, and perhaps for as long as we remain awake. These persisting activation byproducts are precisely what an active forgetting mechanism would get rid of.To test this hypothesis, we explore the evolution of memory traces left by language exposure and/or practice and use. Language provides an ideal testbed, as the same linguistic event can provoke both lingering effects that one would not necessarily want to keep and sleep-dependent offline consolidation of unitized new information. We already have linguistic performance measures that index both kinds of effects, and the consolidation of new lexical knowledge through sleep is well documented at this stage.Work Package 1 examines the fate of memories for novel word forms and their potential for either consolidation or clean-up. Work Package 2 provides multiple tests of whether sleep does clean the slate by removing lingering traces. Our pilot data (Fig. TA6) suggest that it does. Finally, Work Package 3 focuses on at-risk populations, namely older adults and sleep apnoea patients, to evaluate the impact of poor sleep on both memory consolidation and clean-up simultaneously. If older adults show impaired clean-up on top of consolidation problems, reduced clean-up could be one of the factors behind the gradual cognitive decline that characterizes normal aging.Our experiments focus on language memories to explore whether sleep resets what we have called IBM. Positive findings will provide a proof of concept, with a strong potential for applications in domains as varied as education, work patterns, sports science, aging, extended military missions, and neurocognitive rehabilitation.

该项目研究除了巩固新学习之外，睡眠是否有助于清除最近感知和认知活动中不需要的残留物。传统的学习观点认为新记忆会暂时不稳定，但很快就会巩固，从而对遗忘剂和新学习的干扰产生抵抗力（McGaugh，2000；Wixted，2004）。然而，最近的理论（Stickgold＆Walker，2013）坚持认为，记忆巩固不是刚刚描述的统一和不加区别的过程，而是高度选择性和适应性的，根据有机体的目标导向需求量身定制。睡眠及其相关的神经生理状态是“记忆分类”过程的主要工具：只有在情感上突出或值得记住以供将来使用的记忆才能获得 融入大脑不断发展的知识景观中。在这里，我们要问，那些不想要的记忆会发生什么，这些记忆也是从记忆之间的无人区开始的（即工作记忆和长期记忆之间；从此以后，IBM）？该项目的目标是确定除了稳定和吸收有用的记忆之外，睡眠是否还可以清除不需要的记忆以重置系统，以便第二天重新开始。离线、睡眠依赖的记忆巩固的证据是大量的，显示出各种变革性的结果，包括增强对遗忘剂的恢复力、增强的可访问性、自发恢复、提取基础结构以及与现有的整合 知识。相比之下，内存清理的存在尚未得到证实。我们认为这主要是因为研究人员认为他们可能会迫使学习者忘记新学到的信息。我们的前提是，不需要的残留物主要包括最近由感知、表达或基于图像的经验唤起的长期记忆的挥之不去的激活。这种激活会累积一天中特定记忆的参与记录。因此，这可能会相当隐秘地影响我们在接下来的几个小时内的行为方式，甚至可能会影响我们保持清醒的时间。这些持久的激活副产品正是主动遗忘机制所要消除的。为了检验这一假设，我们探索了语言接触和/或实践和使用留下的记忆痕迹的演变。语言提供了一个理想的测试平台，因为相同的语言事件可能会引发人们不一定想要保留的挥之不去的影响，以及依赖于睡眠的统一新信息的离线巩固。我们已经有了对这两种效果进行索引的语言表现测量，并且在这个阶段通过睡眠巩固新词汇知识的情况已有充分记录。工作包 1 检查新词形式记忆的命运及其巩固或清理的潜力。工作包 2 提供了多项测试，来测试睡眠是否能够通过消除挥之不去的痕迹来清理记录。我们的试点数据（图 TA6）表明确实如此。最后，工作包 3 重点关注高危人群，即老年人和睡眠呼吸暂停患者，以评估睡眠不佳对记忆巩固和清理的同时影响。如果老年人除了巩固问题之外还表现出清理功能受损，那么清理功能的减少可能是正常衰老特征的认知逐渐下降背后的因素之一。我们的实验重点关注语言记忆，以探索睡眠是否会重置我们所谓的IBM。积极的发现将提供概念证明，在教育、工作模式、运动科学、老龄化、扩展军事任务和神经认知康复等领域具有巨大的应用潜力。

项目成果

Context variability promotes generalization in reading aloud: Insight from a neural network simulation.

上下文可变性促进了朗读的泛化：来自神经网络模拟的见解。

• 发表时间: 2020
• 作者: Miller, I.D.

Wait long and prosper! Delaying production alleviates its detrimental effect on word learning

等待漫长并繁荣！

• DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2022.2144917
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
• 作者: Kapnoula E

All Things Morphology - Its independence and its interfaces

万物形态学——它的独立性和它的接口

• DOI: 10.1075/cilt.353.10cor
• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: Corbett G

Individual differences in plasticity in speech perception

言语感知可塑性的个体差异

• 发表时间: 2018
• 作者: Kim D

Psycholinguists should resist the allure of linguistic units as perceptual units

心理语言学家应该抵制语言单位作为感知单位的诱惑

• DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2019.104070
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: Journal of Memory and Language
• 影响因子: 4.3
• 作者: Samuel A