Sleep, Memory Consolidation, and Semantic Relationships in a Verbal Declarative Memory Task

It remains unclear, but critically important, to determine whether sleep influences the consolidation of declarative memories. Although several recent studies suggest a beneficial role of sleep in the consolidation of verbal declarative memories, these studies have typically used a “split-night” procedure, where memory for word pairs was tested after 3 hours of early sleep, or after 3 hours of late sleep (e.g. Plihal and Born, 1997, although see Ellenbogen et al., in press). In this study, we used English translations of Gais and Born’s (2004) wordpairs, and compared performance on these original, semantically related word-pairs to performance on a matched list of unrelated word-pairs after a 12-hour period containing either sleep or wake.