Age-related decline in sleep-dependent memory consolidation

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One of my research interests which I focused on as a graduate student and my initial years as a post- doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley is examining the functional role of the cerebellum in movement and cognition. Under a post-doctoral NRSA, I focused on a task that spans both of these domains, sequence learning, which is impaired in patients with cerebellar damage. To understand this impairment, I began what has become a new research line examining the role of sleep in learning and consolidation of such tasks. Sleep is beneficial to sequence learning: performance on a simple, explicit sequence task is improved following a 12 hour interval containing sleep more so than following a 12 hour interval without sleep. My recent research shows that this benefit is limited to tasks which engage the hippocampus. Moreover, I found that the benefit of sleep on performance of hippocampal-dependent sequence learning tasks is not present in older adults (45-80 years). This result leads to a number of questions which will be examined in the proposed research. I will examine whether the lack of sleep-dependent consolidation is due to decreased quantity or quality of essential stages of sleep using polysomnography. Additionally, I will examine whether the deficit in sleep-dependent consolidation in older adults is generalizable to other, non- motor, sleep-dependent learning tasks (e.g., word-pair association learning) and whether sleep- independent learning also declines with age. The proposed training and research plans will be beneficial for obtaining a faculty position in which I can continue to pursue studies of the role of sleep in learning in older adults as an independent investigator; I plan to conduct the initial polysomnography study while at UC Berkeley where I have mentors to advise me in the use of this technique and to aid with any neuropsychological, statistical or experimental design issues that arise. The results of this research will be beneficial for treating age-related memory decline. It is expected that these experiments will provide evidence that sleep architecture underlies age-related decline in learning and memory. In doing so, treatments for memory decline can be more appropriately targeted: if the lack of sleep benefit is related to decreased sleep quantity or quality, therapies which enhance sleep may improve age-related decreases in memory.