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Experimental task and procedure. (A) Picture definition task: at each session, children and adults were asked to provide the definition of the non-object presented on the screen. Responses had to be given after the appearance of the question mark (1 s after stimulus onset). (B) Sample illustrations of the 50 non-objects used. (C) Experimental protocol: children and adults had to learn the definition of the 50 non-objects presented in the morning (Wake condition) or in the evening (Sleep condition) and directly retrieve it during the immediate retrieval session. Psychomotor vigilance was also assessed using the 5-minutes of the PVT. After a 10–12-h retention interval filled with sleep (children, N =15 ; adults, N = 16) or wakefulness (children, N = 15; adults, N = 18), a delayed retrieval of the 50 magical functions associated to the non-objects occurred, followed by the 5-minutes psychomotor vigilance task.
Source publication
Post-learning slow wave sleep (SWS) is known to support declarative memory consolidation. As SWS is more abundant in young population, we suggested that sleep-dependent memory consolidation processes could occur at a faster pace in school-aged children. After learning new associations between non-objects and their functions, retrieval performance w...
Similar publications
From early to middle childhood, brain regions that underlie memory consolidation undergo profound maturational changes. However, there is little empirical investigation that directly relates age-related differences in brain structural measures to the memory consolidation processes. The present study examined system-level memory consolidations of in...
Citations
... Furthermore, our results are in line with previous studies that reported worse memory retention for associative information in school age children compared to adults (Østby et al., 2012;Schommartz et al., 2021). On the other hand, our results are not in line with sleep-related beneficial effects on mnemonic performance of 7-to-12-year-old children after one night delay (Peiffer et al., 2020;Wang et al., 2018) that were shown for novel stimuli not related to any prior knowledge (in the sense of arbitrary stimuli). As we opted for welllearned information that should allow for rapid creation of new schemas or integration of new associations into already existing schemas, our findings indicate that the beneficial role of sleep on memory consolidation in children compared to adults may not apply for repeatedly and strategically learned information. ...
Memory consolidation tends to be less robust in childhood than adulthood. However, little is known about the corresponding functional differences in the developing brain that may underlie age-related differences in retention of memories over time. This study examined system-level memory consolidation of object-scene associations after learning (immediate delay), one night of sleep (short delay), as well as two weeks (long delay) in 5-to-7-year-old children (n = 49) and in young adults (n = 39), as a reference group with mature consolidation systems. Particularly, we characterized how functional neural activation and reinstatement of neural patterns change over time, assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging combined with representational (dis)similarity analysis (RSA). Our results showed that memory consolidation in children was less robust (i.e., more forgetting) compared to young adults. For correctly retained remote memories, young adults showed increased neural activation from short to long delay in neocortical (parietal, prefrontal and occipital) and cerebellar brain regions, while children showed increased neural activation in prefrontal and decrease in neural activity in parietal brain regions over time. In addition, there was an overall attenuated scene-specific memory reinstatement of neural patterns in children compared to young adults. At the same time, we observed category-based reinstatement in medial-temporal, neocortical (prefrontal and parietal), and cerebellar brain regions only in children. Taken together, 5-to-7-year-old children, compared to young adults, show less robust memory consolidation, possibly due to difficulties in engaging in differentiated neural reinstatement in neocortical mnemonic regions during retrieval of remote memories, coupled with relying more on gist-like, category-based neural reinstatement.
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Children showed less robust memory consolidation across short and long delay compared to young adults.
Neural activity for remote memory increases from short to long delay in neocortical (parietal, prefrontal and occipital) and cerebellar brain regions in young adults, but not in children.
Children showed reduced scene-specific reinstatement of neural patterns compared to young adults.
Children relied more on gist-like, category-based neural reinstatement in medial-temporal, neocortical prefrontal and parietal, and cerebellar brain regions.
... First, despite reported sleep-dependent benefits to schema-based learning in children, 61 and young adults; 22,42 caution must be taken before generalising our findings in adolescents to adults. Sleep and brain structure/function during adolescence appear to be interconnected. ...
Study Objectives
Sleep contributes to declarative memory consolidation. Independently, schemas benefit memory. Here we investigated how sleep compared with active wake benefits schema consolidation 12 and 24 hours after initial learning.
Methods
53 adolescents (age: 15–19 year) randomly assigned into sleep and active wake groups participated in a schema-learning protocol based on transitive inference (i.e. If B>C and C>D then B>D). Participants were tested immediately after learning and following 12-hr, and 24-hr intervals of wake or sleep for both the adjacent (e.g., B-C,C-D; relational memory) and inference pairs: (e.g.: B-D,B-E,C-E). Memory performance following the respective 12-hour and 24-hour intervals were analysed using a mixed ANOVA with schema (schema, no-schema) as the within-subject factor, and condition (sleep, wake) as the between-subject factor.
Results
12-hours after learning, there were significant main effects of condition (sleep, wake) and schema, as well as a significant interaction, whereby schema-related memory was significantly better in the sleep condition compared to wake. Higher sleep spindle density was most consistently associated with greater overnight schema-related memory benefit. After 24 hours, the memory advantage of initial sleep was diminished.
Conclusions
Overnight sleep preferentially benefits schema-related memory consolidation following initial learning compared with active wake, but this advantage may be eroded after a subsequent night of sleep. This is possibly due to delayed consolidation that might occur during subsequent sleep opportunity in the wake group.
... 263 Children of similar age (7-12 years) showed likewise a greater sleep-dependent gain than adult controls for associative memories between artificial objects and their functions. 264 Magnetoencephalographic recordings indicated an involvement of hippocampal and parahippocampal regions at learning, whereas the sleep-dependent consolidation of the object-function associations in the children was associated with marked changes in prefrontal cortex activity at recall testing. 265 The findings led the authors to propose that sleep triggers a reorganization of memory-related brain activity toward prefrontal areas, which in the children occurs at a faster rate than in adults. ...
Although long-term memory consolidation is supported by sleep, it is unclear how it differs from that during wakefulness. Our review, focusing on recent advances in the field, identifies the repeated replay of neuronal firing patterns as a basic mechanism triggering consolidation during sleep and wakefulness. During sleep, memory replay occurs during slow-wave sleep (SWS) in hippocampal assemblies together with ripples, thalamic spindles, neocortical slow oscillations, and noradrenergic activity. Here, hippocampal replay likely favors the transformation of hippocampus-dependent episodic memory into schema-like neocortical memory. REM sleep following SWS might balance local synaptic rescaling accompanying memory transformation with a sleep-dependent homeostatic process of global synaptic renormalization. Sleep-dependent memory transformation is intensified during early development despite the immaturity of the hippocampus. Overall, beyond its greater efficacy, sleep consolidation differs from wake consolidation mainly in that it is supported, rather than impaired, by spontaneous hippocampal replay activity possibly gating memory formation in neocortex.
... Although much is known about how memory representations are encoded and retrieved in childhood, memory retention across longer consolidation periods is much less researched and may progress with different temporal dynamics in children who are about to start the school in comparison to adults (Peiffer et al., 2020a;Wang et al., 2018;Wilhelm et al., 2008). For instance, it has been shown that short-delay memory consolidation rate (i.e., measured after one night of sleep) is comparable between children aged 6-8 years and young adults for word-pair associates (Wilhelm et al., 2008). ...
... Memory retention rates were measured as an indirect index of memory consolidation, particularly the stabilization of initially encoded information, by keeping encoding comparable and retrieval demands low across all time points. We hypothesized no differences in short-delay memory consolidation between children and young adults (Peiffer et al., 2020a;Wang et al., 2018), but less robust long-delay consolidation in children in comparison to young adults (Ghetti and Bunge, 2012;Lebel et al., 2012;Shing et al., 2010). Furthermore, we applied a partial least squares correlation analysis (PLSC) to map behavioural memory consolidation measures (i.e., retention rate) onto multiple structural regions-of-interest (ROIs) reported previously to be involved in memory processes. ...
... Children showed steeper accuracy percentage change and thus lower short and long-delay retention rates in comparison to young adults, indicating reduced retained memory of prior-knowledge-dependent complex associative information across time. On the one hand, our result is not in line with the findings of higher short-delay memory consolidation (i.e., after one night of sleep) for incidental learning episodic tasks in 7-12-years-old children in comparison to young adults (Peiffer et al., 2020a;Wang et al., 2018). These studies suggested that higher proportion of slow wave sleep in children in comparison to adults may contribute to possible age-related consolidation benefits. ...
From early to middle childhood, brain regions that underlie memory consolidation undergo profound maturational changes. However, there is little empirical investigation that directly relates age-related differences in brain structural measures to memory consolidation processes. The present study examined memory consolidation of intentionally studied object-location associations after one night of sleep (short delay) and after two weeks (long delay) in normally developing 5-to-7-year-old children (n = 50) and young adults (n = 39). Behavioural differences in memory retention rate were related to structural brain measures. Our results showed that children, in comparison to young adults, retained correctly learnt object-location associations less robustly over short and long delay. Moreover, using partial least squares correlation method, a unique multivariate profile comprised of specific neocortical (prefrontal, parietal, and occipital), cerebellar, and hippocampal head and subfield structures in the body was found to be associated with variation in short-delay memory retention. A different multivariate profile comprised of a reduced set of brain structures, mainly consisting of neocortical (prefrontal, parietal, and occipital), hippocampal head, and selective hippocampal subfield structures (CA1-2 and subiculum) was associated with variation in long-delay memory retention. Taken together, the results suggest that multivariate structural pattern of unique sets of brain regions are related to variations in short- and long-delay memory consolidation across children and young adults.
... Amongst these architectural changes are increases in the amount of nocturnal SWS as well as higher SWA over childhood, with claims that the proportion of SWS peaks at age 10e12 years (Campbell & Feinberg, 2009;Kurth et al., 2010;Ohayon et al., 2004;Wilhelm et al., 2012Wilhelm et al., , 2013. Since SWS is thought to be key for effective sleep-dependent memory consolidation and tends to account for roughly double the proportion of night time sleep in pre-early adolescents relative to adults, it has been found that direct comparisons of these age groups produces enhanced sleep-dependent consolidation effects in children (Peiffer, Brichet, De Tiege, Peigneux, & Urbain, 2020;Wilhelm et al., 2013). For word learning, Weighall et al. (2017) demonstrated that after sleep, 7-8 year-olds had greater increases in explicit memory for newly learned words than adults. ...
Memory representations of newly learned words undergo changes during nocturnal sleep, as evidenced by improvements in explicit recall and lexical integration (i.e., after sleep, novel words compete with existing words during online word recognition). Some studies have revealed larger sleep-benefits in children relative to adults. However, whether daytime naps play a similar facilitatory role is unclear. We investigated the effect of a daytime nap (relative to wake) on explicit memory (recall/recognition) and lexical integration (lexical competition) of newly learned novel words in young adults and children aged 10-12 years, also exploring white matter correlates of the pre- and post-nap effects of word learning in the child group with diffusion weighted MRI. In both age groups, a nap maintained explicit memory of novel words and wake led to forgetting. However, there was an age group interaction when comparing change in recall over the nap: children showed a slight improvement whereas adults showed a slight decline. There was no evidence of lexical integration at any point. Although children spent proportionally more time in slow-wave sleep (SWS) than adults, neither SWS nor spindle parameters correlated with over-nap changes in word learning. For children, increased fractional anisotropy (FA) in the uncinate fasciculus and arcuate fasciculus were associated with the recognition of novel words immediately after learning, and FA in the right arcuate fasciculus was further associated with changes in recall of novel words over a nap, supporting the importance of these tracts in the word learning and consolidation process. These findings point to a protective role of naps in word learning (at least under the present conditions), and emphasize the need to better understand both the active and passive roles that sleep plays in supporting vocabulary consolidation over development.
... There is also increasing evidence that the benefits of sleep on memory may be greater in children than adults. For example, one recent study lends support to this hypothesis for declarative memories, as 7-12-year-olds, but not adults, showed sleep-dependent enhancements of new object memory even when initial encoding scores did not differ (Peiffer et al. 2020). Likewise, in a separate study examining memory retention for item locations associated with high rewards, differences between sleep and daytime wake in 7-11-year-old children were more pronounced than in adults, with children showing clear forgetting over an interval awake and superior retention across overnight sleep (Prehn-Kristensen et al. 2018). ...
... As such, most studies of sleep and memory in infancy and early childhood have taken advantage of this nap window, focusing on the memory benefits of the nap alone (relative to midday wake; e.g., Esterline & Gómez 2021, He et al. 2020, Werchan & Gómez 2014, Wilhelm et al. 2012a. Conversely, sleep-dependent consolidation studies in middle childhood focus exclusively on overnight sleep (Backhaus et al. 2008;Fischer et al. 2007;Henderson et al. 2012;James et al. 2020;Munz et al. 2021;Peiffer et al. 2020;Prehn-Kristensen et al. 2013, 2009, 2011Wilhelm et al. 2008Wilhelm et al. , 2013. ...
Sleep supports memory processing. In adults, memories are consolidated to a greater extent over an interval of sleep than over intervals spent awake. Behavioral evidence supports a benefit of sleep for memory consolidation in infants and children as well. While mechanistic studies are few, current evidence supports a role in memory consolidation for slow-wave sleep in particular. Mounting evidence suggests that these effects are modulated by brain development and may evolve from infancy to adulthood. Moreover, as reviewed here, sleep benefits in infancy and early childhood may be dependent on the type of learning and sleep bout (nap versus overnight). Understanding the typical development of sleep-related memory processing is critical to understanding compromised or atypical development and to informing sleep-focused interventions to improve memory during critical periods of learning across childhood.
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... Since 1955 when Aserinsky and Kleitman (1955) first assessed eye movements and their potential relationship with sleep depth in infants, there has been a constant growth in sleep research in children investigating not only sleep duration but also sleep quality and sleep physiology. Nowadays, there is consensus that sleep enhances memory consolidation for various memory domains in children, especially regarding declarative (explicit) memory (Ashworth, Hill, Karmiloff-Smith, & Dimitriou, 2014;Hahn et al., 2019;Hahn, Heib, Schabus, Hoedlmoser, & Helfrich, 2020;Peiffer, Brichet, De Tiege, Peigneux, & Urbain, 2020;Wang, Weber, Zinke, Inostroza, & Born, 2018;Wilhelm, Diekelmann, & Born, 2008). A study examining implicit and explicit knowledge for motor sequence learning (Wilhelm et al., 2013) showed that children demonstrate even greater gains in sleepdependent explicit knowledge than adults. ...
Increasingly studied in a systematic manner since the 1970s, the cognitive processes of the brain taking place during sleeping periods remain an important object of scrutiny in the scientific community. In particular, sleep has been demonstrated to play a significant role for learning and memory consolidation processes, and sleep scientists have started unravelling its underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. However, sleep remains a multidimensional phenomenon, and many questions remain left open for future research. In this selective review article, we address recent advances in particular domains in which sleep research has further progressed in the past decade. We highlight the developmental trajectory of sleep‐dependent learning and memory consolidation processes, from their development in childhood to their potential impairments in ageing, and the nature and extent of our capabilities for information processing, learning, and memory reinforcement during sleep.
... Some researches expressed that both children and adolescence's performance improve in declarative memory consolidation after one night sleep. However, this improvement was not sleep related in procedural memory [7,16,31,32,41]. Other researchers found that sleep can be useful both in children and adults' declarative and procedural memory consolidation after training for a new motor skill [3,41]. ...
... Sugawara et al. [35] suggested that sleep is associated with offline skill enhancement in explicit motor sequence task in children, as in adults. Peiffer et al. [31] showed overnight gains of declarative (explicit) memory retention performance in children. However, other researchers showed that sleep, compared to wake in retention test, enhanced the consolidation of implicit motor sequence tasks. ...
... However, researchers, investigating procedural and declarative memory in children, used simple tasks which were naturally implicit (i.e., serial reaction time, implicit continuous task) or explicit (i.e., two-dimensional objects location, word-pair associates, finger tapping task) compared to adults [3,41]. However, implicit and explicit knowledge of task instructions and regulations were typically not manipulated in these sequence tasks researches [3,7,13,16,31,41]. So, considering the little evidence in children and not having enough investigations of the type of knowledge relating to the task sequence, we cannot generalize the results of the adult researches to the children. ...
Study aim : The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of sleep and awareness on consolidation of general and Sequence-Specific learning in children.
Material and methods : Male participants (n = 48, 10 to 12 years old) were assigned to one of four groups based on awareness and sleep. Acquisition phase took place in the morning (wake groups, 8 ± am) or in the evening (sleep groups, 8 ± pm) followed by a 12 hours retention interval and a subsequent delayed retention test (1 week). Children in the explicit groups were informed about the presence of the sequence, while in the implicit groups were not informed about it. For data analysis in consolidation of general sequence learning and Sequence-Specific Consolidation phases, 2 × 2 × 2 and 2 × 2 × 3 ANOVA with repeated measures on block tests were used respectively.
Results : The data provides evidence of offline enhancement of general motor learning after 12 hours which was dependent on sleep and awareness. Moreover, the information persistence after 1-week was significant only in sleep groups. The results also indicated that consolidation of sequence-specific learning was only observed after 12 hours in element duration and it was related to sleep and awareness.
Conclusions : The results revealed that sleep wasn’t only an essential factor in enhancement of off-line sequence learning task after 12 hours in children, but performance of the children was dependent on awareness and sleep.
... While a recent study found comparable benefits of prior knowledge on sleep-dependent memory consolidation in children [59], our findings in adolescents should not be generalized, until Density was defined as the number of spindles per minute. Subjects with more than 10 percent artifacts were removed. ...
Study Objectives
The learning brain establishes schemas (knowledge structures) that benefit subsequent learning. We investigated how sleep and having a schema might benefit initial learning followed by rearranged and expanded memoranda. We concurrently examined the contributions of sleep spindles and slow wave sleep to learning outcomes.
Methods
53 adolescents were randomly assigned to an 8h Nap schedule (6.5h nocturnal sleep with a 90-minute daytime nap) or an 8h No-Nap, nocturnal-only sleep schedule. The study spanned 14 nights, simulating successive school weeks. We utilized a transitive inference task involving hierarchically ordered faces. Initial learning to set up the schema was followed by rearrangement of the hierarchy (accommodation) and hierarchy expansion (assimilation). The expanded sequence was restudied. Recall of hierarchical knowledge was tested after initial learning and at multiple points for all subsequent phases. As a control, both groups underwent a No-schema condition where the hierarchy was introduced and modified without opportunity to set up a schema. EEG accompanied the multiple sleep opportunities.
Results
There were main effects of Nap schedule and Schema condition evidenced by superior recall of initial learning, reordered and expanded memoranda. Improved recall was consistently associated with higher fast spindle density but not slow-wave measures. This was true for both nocturnal sleep and daytime naps.
Conclusion
A sleep schedule incorporating regular nap opportunities compared to one that only had nocturnal sleep benefited building of robust and flexible schemas, facilitating recall of the subsequently rearranged and expanded structured knowledge. These benefits appear to be strongly associated with fast spindles.
... Since SWS is thought to be key for effective sleep-dependent memory consolidation and tends to account for roughly double the proportion of night time sleep in pre-early adolescents relative to adults, it has been predicted that direct comparisons of these age groups will produce enhanced sleep-dependent consolidation effects in children. Aligning with this, Wilhelm et al. (2013) found that compared to adults, 8-11 year old children showed greater gains in explicit knowledge of a motor sequence following sleep, and this was related to higher nocturnal SWA (see also Peiffer et al., 2020). For word learning, Weighall et al. (2017) demonstrated that after sleep, 7-8 year-olds had greater increases in explicit memory for newly learned words than adults. ...
Behavioural and neuroimaging data suggest that memory representations of newly learned words undergo changes during nocturnal sleep, including improvements in explicit recall and lexical integration (i.e., after sleep, novel words compete with existing words during online word recognition). Some studies have revealed larger sleep-benefits in children relative to adults. However, whether daytime naps play a similar facilitatory role is unclear. We investigated the effect of a daytime nap (relative to wake) on explicit memory (recall/recognition) and lexical integration (lexical competition) of newly learned novel words in young adults and children aged 10-12 years, also exploring white matter correlates of the pre- and post-nap effects of word learning in the child group with diffusion weighted MRI. In both age groups, a nap maintained explicit memory of novel words and wake led to forgetting. However, there was an age group interaction when comparing change in recall over the nap: children showed a slight improvement whereas adults showed a slight decline. There was no evidence of lexical integration at any point. Although children spent proportionally more time in slow-wave sleep (SWS) than adults, neither SWS nor spindle parameters correlated with over-nap changes in word learning. For children, increased fractional anisotropy (FA) in the uncinate fasciculus and arcuate fasciculus were associated with the recognition of novel words immediately after learning, and FA in the right arcuate fasciculus was further associated with changes in recall of novel words over a nap, supporting the importance of these tracts in the word learning and consolidation process. These findings point to a protective role of naps in word learning, and emphasize the need to advance theories of word learning by better understanding both the active and passive roles that sleep plays in supporting vocabulary consolidation over development.
