Abstract
Sleep has repeatedly been connected to processes of memory consolidation. While extensive research indeed documents beneficial effects of sleep on memory, little is yet known about the role of sleep for interference effects in episodic memory. Although two prior studies reported sleep to reduce retroactive interference, no sleep effect has previously been found for proactive interference. Here, ...
Abstract
Sleep has repeatedly been connected to processes of memory consolidation. While extensive research indeed documents beneficial effects of sleep on memory, little is yet known about the role of sleep for interference effects in episodic memory. Although two prior studies reported sleep to reduce retroactive interference, no sleep effect has previously been found for proactive interference. Here, we applied a different study format than the prior studies to induce a high degree of proactive interference, and asked subjects to encode a single list or two interfering lists of paired associates via pure study cycles. Testing occurred after 12 hours of diurnal wakefulness or nocturnal sleep. Consistent with the prior work, we found sleep in comparison to wake to not affect memory for the single list, but to reduce retroactive interference. In addition, we found sleep to reduce proactive interference, and to reduce retroactive and proactive interference to the same extent. The finding is consistent with the view that arising benefits of sleep are caused by the reactivation of memory contents during sleep, which has been suggested to strengthen and stabilize memories. Such stabilization may make memories less susceptible to competition from interfering memories at test and thus reduce interference effects.
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