19 This difficulty has likely arisen, in part, from reliance on passive visual stimulation as a pre-sleep stimulus, the effects of which are often overshadowed by the much more salient experience of spending the night in a sleep laboratory. 17, 18 Yet historically, controlled laboratory studies have met with little success in experimentally manipulating sleep mentation through the use of specific pre-sleep interventions. It is well known that a general correspondence exists between waking life experience and dream content, in that predominant persons, concerns, and activities in an individual's waking life also are consistently evident in their his or her sleep mentation reports. To approach these questions, we employed a highly engaging visuomotor video game (downhill skiing arcade game Alpine Racer™ II) as an intensive learning task, and observed the effects of this training on mentation during subsequent periods of light NREM sleep (stages 1 and 2). The present study extends this work by asking how specific features of this cognitive-level memory reactivation change across time, and by examining task performance as a predictor of this replay effect. 11 have previously demonstrated that an engaging, visually salient learning task (the popular video game Tetris®) exerts a direct influence on subsequent sleep onset mentation. 16 report that dreaming symbolically of stories presented to participants prior to sleep is associated with enhanced morning recall, suggesting that task-related mentation could have a beneficial effect on memory performance. Smith and Hanke, 15 for example, report evidence of sleep mentation related to a pre-sleep learning task, present to a greater degree in participants cued during sleep using a task-associated sound.
Though little empirical work has thus far addressed this question, some preliminary evidence is at least suggestive of a link between sleep mentation and recent learning. We propose that reports of subjective experience may provide a valuable methodology for exploring the characteristics of memory traces recruited for reactivation during sleep. 12, 13 Similarly, only intermittent fragments of recent episodic memories appear in sleep mentation, intermingled with remote and semantic material. Neuronal firing sequences established during wake are re-expressed only intermittently during rodent NREM sleep, with relatively low fidelity and on a faster time scale than the original experience. Recent experience is not replayed veridically during sleep.
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