Sleep to be social: Sleep-dependent processing of social information about the self and others

从复杂和高度动态的社会互动中学习和提取社会信息是人类的核心能力。为了适应社会环境，人类需要了解他人的行为，同时根据社会反馈调整自己的行为。因此，对社会性信息的处理和提取在社会行为的各个领域都具有重要的功能。这项计划的首要目标是研究人类睡眠在处理关于自己和他人的社会信息中的功能作用，以及在睡眠期间从这些复杂的社会信息中提取的要点。具体来说，我们的目标是表明，通过睡眠依赖性记忆巩固来增强对自己和他人的社会信息的学习，并且这种增强将比非社会信息的处理更强。我们将进一步展示如何通过在睡眠期间通过与学习相关的线索操纵关于自己、他人或非社会计算机算法的信息的重新激活来修改这些过程。最后，我们将揭示睡眠依赖的社会信息记忆巩固的神经机制。该项目的研究结果将为患有社交信息处理障碍的患者开辟新的睡眠治疗途径，例如自闭症谱系障碍，边缘型人格或社交焦虑障碍。

The learning and abstraction of social information from complex and highly dynamic social interactions is a central human capacity. In order to navigate the social environment, human beings need to understand others’ behaviors and at the same time adapt their own behavior based on social feedback. Processing and abstraction of social gist-like information thereby has an essential function in various domains of social behavior. The overarching goal of this proposal is to study the functional role of human sleep in the processing of social information about oneself and others and what is abstracted during sleep as gist from such complex social information. Specifically, we aim to show that learning of social information about oneself and others is enhanced through sleep-dependent memory consolidation and that such enhancement will be stronger than for the processing of non-social information. We will further show how these processes can be modified by manipulating the reactivation of information about oneself, others or a non-social computer algorithm during sleep via learning-associated cues. Finally, we will reveal the neural mechanisms underlying sleep-dependent memory consolidation of social information. The findings of this project will open new avenues for sleep-based treatments in patients who suffer from disorders of social information processing, e.g. in Autism Spectrum Disorder, Borderline Personality or Social Anxiety Disorders.