Sleep Improves Prospective Remembering by Facilitating Spontaneous-Associative Retrieval Processes

Abstract

Memories are of the past but for the future, enabling individuals to implement intended plans and actions at the appropriate time. Prospective memory is the specific ability to remember and execute an intended behavior at some designated point in the future. Although sleep is well-known to benefit the consolidation of memories for past events, its role for prospective memory is still not well understood. Here, we show that sleep as compared to wakefulness after prospective memory instruction enhanced the successful execution of prospective memories two days later. We further show that sleep benefited both components of prospective memory, i.e. to remember that something has to be done (prospective component) and to remember what has to be done (retrospective component). Finally, sleep enhanced prospective remembering particularly when attentional resources were reduced during task execution, suggesting that subjects after sleep were able to recruit additional spontaneous-associative retrieval processes to remember intentions successfully. Our findings indicate that sleep supports the maintenance of prospective memory over time by strengthening intentional memory representations, thus favoring the spontaneous retrieval of the intended action at the appropriate time.

Consolidation of Prospective Memory: Effects of Sleep on Completed and Reinstated Intentions

“…Our Basic experiment (Diekelmann et al, 2013a) established that sleep facilitates the ability to execute an intended action at the appropriate time after a delay of 2 days (see Figure 1A for the experimental design). Most interestingly, subjects who were allowed to sleep after intention formation detected more cues in the ongoing task at the delayed test session specifically under divided attention conditions.…”

“…Recent evidence further suggests that sleep supports different aspects and processes of prospective remembering (Diekelmann et al, 2013a). Prospective memory includes two sub-components: the ability to remember that something has to be done (the prospective component or intent ), and the ability to remember what has to be done (the retrospective component or content ) (Einstein and McDaniel, 1990, 1996; Kliegel et al, 2008).…”

“…A study by Diekelmann et al (2013a) indicated that sleep after the instruction of an intention improves both the prospective component and the retrospective component of prospective memory and facilitates the use of spontaneous associative retrieval processes to retrieve the intention. In this study, subjects learned 20 cue words, each of which was linked to a specific associated word.…”

“…Additionally, we expected completed intentions to benefit from sleep again when they are reinstated after completion, making them again relevant for later testing. To test these questions, we performed three consecutive experiments, all of which were based on our previously published findings described above (Diekelmann et al, 2013a; from now on called “Basic experiment”).…”

Safety profile of tasimelteon, a melatonin MT1and MT2receptor agonist: pooled safety analyses from six clinical studies

“…Poor sleep as the result of Non-24 may have an important impact on physical and mental health. Recent research has indeed concentrated on how sleep is important for cognition, memory consolidation, energy balance, cardiovascular regulation and immunity [21][22][23][24][25]. Insufficient sleep has been associated with obesity, type-2 diabetes, hypertension, depression, cognition deficit and accidents [26][27][28][29][30][31].…”