Consolidation of adaptation memories depend both on the passage of time and sleep

AGUSTIN SOLANO; GONZALO LERNER; PEDRO CAFFARO; LUIS A RIQUELME; DANIEL PEREZ CHADA; VALERIA DELLA MAGGIORE

San Diego

Simposio; Advances in Motor Learning & Motor Control; 2022

Strong evidence suggests that declarative memories benefit from sleep. However, its contribution tomotor learning is controversial. Motor skill learning (MSL), such as performing a sequence of finger movementsexplicitly, is benefited by sleep [1] whereas the available evidence on sensorimotor adaptation (SMA) suggeststhat consolidation depends exclusively on the passage of time [2,3,4]. These studies generally track memoryretention after a time interval containing or not a period of sleep, but disregard the time elapsed betweentraining and sleep as a potentially relevant factor. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the temporal proximity ofthese events is critical for sleep consolidation of SMA. To this aim, we examined the impact of manipulating thetime interval elapsed between visuomotor adaptation learning (VMA) and sleep on long-term memory and onthe neural markers of sleep consolidation [5].With the aim of confirming the results from previous studies [2,3,4] with our experimental paradigm, inExperiment 1 we examined the effect of sleep on VMA when the time elapsed between training and sleep wasnot taken into account. To this aim, we tracked memory decay as a function of the passage of time, andexamined the impact of a full night of sleep on memory retention. 134 subjects randomly assigned to 6 groupsadapted to an optical rotation (CCW-30o), and underwent a memory retention test with error-clamp (EC) trials atdifferent time intervals post learning (Fig 1A; 15 min, 1 h, 3 h, 5.5 h, 9 h, or 24 h). Critically, the time of trainingwas not manipulated. As observed in Figure 1B (left panel), memory retention decayed with the passage of time(ANOVA, F(5,128)=13.75, p