Sleep to remember: sleep-dependent learning and memory in children and adolescents

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While sleep-dependent memory consolidation has been shown in numerous species, we do not yet understand the role of sleep in learning and memory in children and adolescents. Our long-term goal is to understand the interplay between the regulation of sleep and cognitive development. The objective of this application is to characterize the interplay between sleep regulation and the systems that regulate learning and memory in children and adolescents. The central hypothesis is that sleep is critical for learning and memory in children and adolescents. Our rationale for this study is that successful completion of the proposed research will contribute important insight into the underpinning of learning and memory in children and adolescents. Our contribution is expected to be significant because it is expected to advance our mechanistic understanding of fundamental processes that are critical in the developing brain. We plan to test our central hypothesis and accomplish our objectives by pursuing the following specific aims: 1) Characterize the Interplay Between Sleep and Learning/Memory in Children and Adolescents; 2) Determine the Relevance of Clock Genes to Individual Differences in the Impact of Sleep on Learning and Memory. This study has several strengths: 1) It is based on an innovative experimental approach; 2) It uses advanced objective methodology that overcomes previous methodological challenges in the field; 3) This will be the first study to examine the role of sleep in memory in adolescents; 4) This will be the first examination of the genetic mechanisms involved in these processes; and, 5) This will be the first study to examine the impact of sleep on memory of emotional vs. neutral information in youth. Our results will have an important positive impact, because they are expected to facilitate the understanding of the interplay among sleep, learning-memory in children and adolescents, while also offering unique multidisciplinary training to students at all levels. This will significantly advance the field of developmental neuroscience.