This suggests that position sense memory had decayed too much to substitute for the current conflicting sensory information. Together, our results provide novel, quantitative insight into the temporal properties of tendon

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“As well as consolidating memory, sleep has been proposed to serve a second important function for memory, i.e. to free capacities for the learning of new information during succeeding wakefulness. The slow wave activity (SWA) that is a hallmark of slow wave sleep could be involved in both functions. Here, we aimed to demonstrate a causative role for SWA in enhancing the capacity for encoding of information during subsequent wakefulness, using transcranial slow oscillation stimulation (tSOS) oscillating at 0.75 Hz to induce SWA in healthy humans during an afternoon nap. Encoding following the nap was tested for hippocampus-dependent declarative materials (pictures, word pairs, and word lists) and procedural skills (finger sequence tapping). As compared with a sham stimulation control condition, tSOS during the nap enhanced SWA and significantly improved subsequent http://www.selleckchem.com/products/Metformin-hydrochloride(Glucophage).html encoding on all

three declarative tasks (picture recognition, cued recall of word pairs, and free recall of word lists), whereas procedural finger sequence tapping skill was not affected. Our results indicate that sleep SWA enhances the capacity for encoding of declarative materials, possibly by down-scaling hippocampal synaptic networks that were potentiated towards saturation during the preceding period of wakefulness. Neocortical very slow wave activity (SWA) (0.5–4 Hz), including the < 1-Hz slow oscillations, is a hallmark of slow wave sleep (SWS), and has been shown to play a causal role in the consolidation of declarative memory (Marshall et al., 2006), presumably by driving the redistribution of these hippocampus-dependent memories towards neocortical long-term storage sites (Diekelmann & Born, 2010; Born & Wilhelm, 2011). Apart from this function of consolidating

memory, sleep has been proposed to also benefit the encoding of new information during succeeding periods of wakefulness (McDermott et al., 2003; Yoo et al., 2007; Mander et al., 2011). Basically, encoding is an aspect of memory processing that is entirely different from consolidation, and the influences of sleep on both processes are not necessarily linked to a common mechanism. In fact, some findings suggest that the enhancing effects of prior sleep on subsequent encoding during wakefulness originates from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (Davis et al., 2003; Kim et al., 2005) rather than SWS. However, the preponderance of data appear to support the synaptic down-scaling hypothesis in this context (Tononi & Cirelli, 2003, 2006).