Does Sleep Really Influence Face Recognition Memory?
- Creators
- Sheth, Bhavin R.
- Nguyen, Ngan
- Janvelyan, Davit
Abstract
Mounting evidence implicates sleep in the consolidation of various kinds of memories. We investigated the effect of sleep on memory for face identity, a declarative form of memory that is indispensable for nearly all social interaction. In the acquisition phase, observers viewed faces that they were required to remember over a variable retention period (0–36 hours). In the test phase, observers viewed intermixed old and new faces and judged seeing each before. Participants were classified according to acquisition and test times into seven groups. Memory strength (d′) and response bias (c) were evaluated. Substantial time spent awake (12 hours or more) during the retention period impaired face recognition memory evaluated at test, whereas sleep per se during the retention period did little to enhance the memory. Wakefulness during retention also led to a tightening of the decision criterion. Our findings suggest that sleep passively and transiently shelters face recognition memory from waking interference (exposure) but does not actively aid in its long-term consolidation.
Additional Information
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain declaration which stipulates that, once placed in the public domain, this work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. Received: January 10, 2009; Accepted: April 15, 2009; Published: May 8, 2009. We thank Saumil Patel and Daw-An Wu for reviewing earlier versions of our manuscript and their insightful criticism. We are indebted to the volunteers in our study and to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive remarks. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: BRS. Performed the experiments: NN DJ. Analyzed the data: BRS NN. Wrote the paper: BRS. The work was supported in part by funds from the University of Houston and a Cline Discovery grant (Caltech) to BRS. DJ was supported by a SURF undergraduate fellowship through Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Attached Files
Published - journal.pone.0005496.PDF
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC2674564
- Eprint ID
- 101343
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200218-151249315
- University of Houston
- Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)
- Created
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2020-02-19Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field