Insufficient chunk concatenation may underlie changes in sleep-dependent consolidation of motor sequence learning in older adults
- 1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA
- 2Neuroscience and Behavior, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA
- 3Department of Health and Kinesiology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA
- Corresponding author: rspencer{at}psych.umass.edu
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↵4 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
Sleep enhances motor sequence learning (MSL) in young adults by concatenating subsequences (“chunks”) formed during skill acquisition. To examine whether this process is reduced in aging, we assessed performance changes on the MSL task following overnight sleep or daytime wake in healthy young and older adults. Young adult performance enhancement was correlated with nREM2 sleep, and facilitated by preferential improvement of slowest within-sequence transitions. This effect was markedly reduced in older adults, and accompanied by diminished sigma power density (12–15 Hz) during nREM2 sleep, suggesting that diminished chunk concatenation following sleep may underlie reduced consolidation of MSL in older adults.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.043042.116.
- Received May 27, 2016.
- Accepted June 14, 2016.
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