Sleep Consolidation of Visuomotor Adaptation: Differential effects on Memory Retention and Persistence

SOLANO, AGUSTIN; DELLA MAGGIORE, VALERIA; PEREZ CHADA, DANIEL; RIQUELME, LUIS

Chicago

Congreso; Neuroscience 2019 - SfN Annual Meeting; 2019

Society for Neuroscience

Adaptation is a type of learning that allows maintaining precise motor control in face of environmentaland/or internal perturbations. Like other types of learning, adaptation may lead to interference or facilitationdepending on the level of congruency of sequentially learned materials. We have previously shown thatadaptation to opposing visual rotations, A and B, impairs the ability to learn in B and long-term memorymeasured 24 hours later. Here, we examined the impact of sleep on the retention and persistence ofvisuomotor adaptation memories, in the presence or absence of a conflicting perturbation. To this aim, wecarried out two experiments in which we manipulated the proximity between training and sleep. Wehypothesized that if sleep participates in the consolidation of visuomotor adaptation, then there should be abenefit of the promixity of sleep on memory retention and/or persistence. To examine this possibility wecarried out two experiments: in Experiment 1 (n=26), subjects performed a visuomotor adaptation task (30deg CW perturbation); in Experiment 2 (n=31), a different set of participants performed the same task butunder a protocol of anterograde interference in which they adapted to two opposing visual rotations (30 degCCW followed by 30 deg CW) separated by a 5 min interval. In each experiment one group of subjectsperformed the task in the morning and the other group at night, just before going to sleep. All subjectsparticipated in a whole-night polysomnographic study in the sleep lab, and returned to the lab 24h and 2weeks post training to measure memory retention and persistence, respectively. In agreement with ourprevious work, we found that anterograde interference reduced the overall level of memory retention byabout 70% (p