Oxyopia Abstract

September 18, 2009
Friday, 4:00 PM
489 Minor Hall

Sara Mednick, PhD
Assistant Professor, Laboratory of Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego
Host: Stanley Klein

Title

The role of sleep in cognition: from perception to creativity

Abstract

Memory is not unified, but composed of anatomically and mechanistically distinct processes. My research examines processes that facilitate the formation of memory (i.e., sleep and pharmacology) to gain insight into its underlying mechanisms. We have found that: (1) select types of learning are facilitated during sleep, with procedural learning typically exhibiting an absolute improvement in performance and declarative memory typically exhibiting less forgetting; (2) specific sleep stages are correlated with the consolidation of procedural and declarative memories; (3) pharmacological interventions can selectively enhance or deteriorate memory performance; and (4) more experimentally tractable naps are as effective as nocturnal sleep in these memory processes. By examining when sleep and pharmacology facilitate learning, protect from interference, or have no effect on consolidation, we are able to make predictions about similarities and differences in mechanisms across these memory domains.

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