Remy Schmitz

• Doctor of Psychology
• Maître assistant at Université Libre de Bruxelles

When presented with novel but semantically related elements after learning verbal material, healthy participants tend to endorse these items as previously learned. This reflects the normal integration and association of novel verbal information into long-term memory. How obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) negatively impacts verbal memory performance, a...

Slow wave sleep (SWS) is characterized by the predominance of delta waves and slow oscillations, reflecting the synchronized activity of large cortical neuronal populations. Amongst other functions, SWS plays a crucial role in the restorative capacity of sleep. Rhythmic Acoustic Stimulation (RAS) during SWS has been shown a cost-effective method to...

Study objectives This study investigates the impact of sleep deprivation (SD) on task-goal switching, a key component of cognitive flexibility. Methods Task-goal switching performance was tested after one night of regular sleep (n = 17 participants) or of total SD (n = 18). To understand the relationships between task-switching performance and oth...

Nous aborderons ici succinctement les architectures internes du sommeil et de la mémoire afin de comprendre leurs interactions et présenter les modèles théoriques qui y sont associés. La section suivante introduira les principaux paradigmes expérimentaux utilisés pour étudier les rapports entre sommeil et mémoire. Nous passerons ensuite en revue le...

Comme mentionné dans son intitulé, le syndrome de Trouble de Déficit de l’Attention/Hyperactivité (TDAH) est caractérisé par la présence significative de difficultés attentionnelles. En outre, il est également caractérisé par la présence de symptômes d’impulsivité, ce qui suggère que les fonctions exécutives, responsables de la régulation du compor...

Recent evidence suggests that reactivation of learning-related auditory (Anthony et al., 2012) or olfactory (Diekelmann et al., 2011) cues during sleep enhances memory formation for declarative spatial and verbal memory tasks. In the present study, we investigated whether targeted reactivation during a post-training afternoon nap enhances performan...

Sleep problems have been commonly reported in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This review takes a lifespan perspective in discussing recent findings on sleep disturbances in ASD, including sparse but pivotal studies in toddlers and adults. Current evidence shows that more than a mere comorbidity, sleep disturbances can represent a key...

Beneficial effects of napping or bright light exposure on cognitive performance have been reported in participants exposed to sleep loss. Nonetheless, few studies investigated the effect of these potential countermeasures against the temporary drop in performance observed in mid-afternoon, and even less so on cognitive flexibility, a crucial compon...

That post-training sleep supports the consolidation of sequential motor skills remains debated. Performance improvement and sensitivity to proactive interference are both putative measures of long-term memory consolidation. We tested sleep-dependent memory consolidation for visuo-motor sequence learning using a proactive interference paradigm. Thir...

In the Stroop task, incongruent stimuli (e.g. “red” printed in blue) induce a robust interference effect. The impact of both the changes in the duration of the interval between the subject’s response and the next stimulus (RSI) and the development from childhood to adulthood on the size of the interference have not been systematically studied. We h...

Several studies suggest that sleep improves perceptual skills in the visual texture discrimination task (TDT). Here we report that besides consolidation, sleep also generalizes the learned perceptual abilities to the untrained eye. Healthy volunteers (n = 32) were trained on the TDT, in which they had to discriminate between horizontal and vertical...

Learning the functional properties of objects is a core mechanism in the development of conceptual, cognitive and linguistic knowledge in children. The cerebral processes underlying these learning mechanisms remain unclear in adults and unexplored in children. Here, we investigated the neurophysiological patterns underpinning the learning of functi...

Supplemental details on the methods as well as supplemental Tables and Figures. Figure S1, Learning-related changes in evoked-related fields over the left frontal region (analysis in sensor space). Grand average time courses of ERFs for LNO and UNO non-objects at S1 (LNO: black hyphenated line, UNO: gray hyphenated line) and S2 (LNO: black line; UN...

Previous studies have shown that newly encoded memories are more resistant to retroactive interference when participants are allowed to sleep after learning the original material, suggesting a sleep-related strengthening of memories. In the present study, we investigated delayed, long-term effects of sleep vs. sleep deprivation (SD) on the first po...

Behavioral studies have cast doubts about the role that posttraining sleep may play in the consolidation of implicit sequence learning. Here, we used event-related fMRI to test the hypothesis that sleep-dependent functional reorganization would take place in the underlying neural circuits even in the possible absence of obvious behavioral changes....

Whether sleep contributes to the consolidation of visuo-motor memories remains disputed. We investigated the impact of post-learning sleep on their consolidation using a tactile screen variant of the deterministic serial reaction time task. At learning, subjects practiced blocks 1-6 and 8 (64 trials/block) using a deterministic sequence A. Block 7...

It is known that sleep participates in memory consolidation processes. However, results obtained in the auditory domain are inconsistent. Here we aimed at investigating the role of post-training sleep in auditory training and learning new phonological categories, a fundamental process in speech processing. Adult French-speakers were trained to iden...

The phenomenological experience of sleep as a cessation of waking activity is misleading. Indeed, it suggests that sleep constitutes, like a switch, a simple mechanism by which are shut off all neurophysiological processes associated with an active and costly wake state of vigilance. In this chapter, we present a summary description of sleep and it...

Pseudoneglect is a slight but consistent misplacement of attention toward the left visual field, commonly observed in young healthy subjects. This leftward attentional bias is thought to result from a right hemispheric dominance in visuospatial processing. Changes in endogenous levels of alertness may modulate attentional asymmetries and pseudonegl...

Pseudoneglect is a slight but consistent leftward attentional bias commonly observed in healthy young populations, purportedly explained by right hemispheric dominance. It has been suggested that normal aging might be associated with a decline of the right hemisphere. According to this hypothesis, a few studies have shown that elderly tend to exhib...

In the present chapter, we describe behavioural and neurophysiological studies supporting the hypothesis that sleep exerts a positive impact on long-term retention in declarative memory, either by consolidating relevant memories or by actively erasing unwanted day residues. We do not aim to be comprehensive, but rather to illustrate the complex rel...

Recent studies investigating off-line processes of consolidation in motor learning have demonstrated a sudden, short-lived improvement in performance after 5-30 minutes of post-training inactivity. Here, we investigated further this behavioral boost in the context of the probabilistic serial reaction time task, a paradigm of implicit sequence learn...

Preference for previously seen, unfamiliar objects reflects a memory bias on affective judgment, known as the "mere exposure effect" (MEE). Here, we investigated the effect of time, post-exposure sleep, and the brain hemisphere solicited on preference generalization toward objects viewed in different perspectives. When presented in the right visual...

La tâche de temps de réaction sériel (TRS) probabiliste permet d’étudier le développement progressif d’un apprentissage implicite de séquences, en comparant les temps de réaction obtenus pour des stimuli qui suivent les règles de succession d’une séquence d’items (stimuli grammaticaux, G) aux temps de réaction pour des stimuli qui violent ces règle...