Local coupling between sleep spindles and slow oscillations supports consolidation of visuomotor adaptation

AGUSTIN SOLANO, LUIS RIQUELME, DANIEL PEREZ-CHADA, VALERIA DELLA MAGGIORE.

Congreso; Neuromatch 3.0; 2020

The last decade has seen remarkable progress in the identification of the neural signatures of sleep-dependent consolidation. Yet, with rare exceptions, most advances have emerged from the field of declarative memory. This imbalance may obey to the substantial evidence suggesting that only hippocampal dependent tasks benefit from sleep. Overnight reactivation of hippocampal memories appears to depend on the precise synchrony between slow oscillations (SO) and sleep spindles. Here, we sought to examine whether this coupling is also critical for the consolidation of human motor memories.We hypothesized that if the level of coupling between SO and spindles is also critical for the consolidation of motor memories then it should predict long-term memory overnight. Given that the role of sleep in sensorimotor adaptation is somewhat controversial, in Experiment 1 (n = 46) we tested this hypothesis by manipulating the proximity between visuomotor adaptation (VMA) and sleep. This procedure has been implemented successfully for declarative memories. We found that sleeping immediately after learning increased memory retention by 35% compared to sleeping 14 hours later (p0.05), it substantially modulated the spindle-SO coupling in an inter-hemispheric manner (p