RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Learning graph networks: sleep targets highly connected global and local nodes for consolidation
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.08.04.455038
DO 10.1101/2021.08.04.455038
A1 GB Feld
A1 M Bernard
A1 AB Rawson
A1 HJ Spiers
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/08/05/2021.08.04.455038.abstract
AB Much of our long-term knowledge is organised in complex networks. Sleep is thought to be critical for abstracting knowledge and enhancing important item memory for long-term retention. Thus, sleep should aid the development of memory for networks and the abstraction of their structure for efficient storage. However, this remains unknown because past sleep studies have focused on discrete items. Here we explored the impact of sleep (night-sleep/day-wake within-subject paradigm) on memory for graph-networks where some items were important due to dense local connections (degree centrality) or, independently, important due to greater global connections (closeness / betweenness centrality). A network of 27 planets (nodes) sparsely interconnected by 36 teleporters (edges) was learned via discrete associations without explicit indication of any network structure. Despite equivalent exposure to all connections in the network, we found that memory for the links between items with high local centrality or high global centrality were better retained after sleep. These results highlight that sleep has the capacity for strengthening both global and local structure from the world and abstracting over multiple experiences to efficiently form internal networks of knowledge.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.