Sleep strengthens integration of spatial memory systems
- 1Institute for Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
- 2Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical School, University Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
- 3Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Centre for Neural Computation, The Egil and Pauline Braathen and Fred Kavli Centre for Cortical Microcircuits, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and St. Olavs Hospital, Trondheim University Hospital, Trondheim NO-7491, Norway
- 4Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
- Corresponding author: jan.born{at}uni-tuebingen.de
Abstract
Spatial memory comprises different representational systems that are sensitive to different environmental cues, like proximal landmarks or local boundaries. Here we examined how sleep affects the formation of a spatial representation integrating landmark-referenced and boundary-referenced representations. To this end, participants (n = 42) were familiarized with an environment featuring both a proximal landmark and a local boundary. After nocturnal periods of sleep or wakefulness and another night of sleep, integration of the two representational systems was tested by testing the participant's flexibility to switch from landmark-based to boundary-based navigation in the environment, and vice versa. Results indicate a distinctly increased flexibility in relying on either landmarks or boundaries for navigation, when familiarization to the environment was followed by sleep rather than by wakefulness. A second control study (n = 45) did not reveal effects of sleep (vs. wakefulness) on navigation in environments featuring only landmarks or only boundaries. Thus, rather than strengthening isolated representational systems per se, sleep presumably through forming an integrative representation, enhances flexible coordination of representational subsystems.
Footnotes
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.053249.120.
- Received November 16, 2020.
- Accepted February 21, 2021.
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