Sleep and retrieval practice both strengthen and distort story recollection.

Over time, memories lose episodic detail and become distorted, a process with serious ramifications for eyewitness identification. What are the processes contributing to such transformations over time? We investigated the roles of post-learning sleep and retrieval practice in memory accuracy and distortion, using a naturalistic story recollection task. Undergraduate students listened to a recording of the "War of the Ghosts," a Native American folktale, and were assigned to either a sleep or wake delay group, and either a retrieval practice or listen-only study condition.

The effects of shared, depression-specific, and anxiety-specific internalizing symptoms on negative and neutral episodic memories following post-learning sleep.

Emotional memory bias is a common characteristic of internalizing symptomatology and is enhanced during sleep. The current study employs bifactor S-1 modeling to disentangle depression-specific anhedonia, anxiety-specific anxious arousal, and the common internalizing factor, general distress, and test whether these internalizing symptoms interact with sleep to influence memory for emotional and neutral information. Healthy adults (N = 281) encoded scenes featuring either negative objects (e.

Targeted Memory Reactivation during Nonrapid Eye Movement Sleep Enhances Neutral, But Not Negative, Components of Memory.

Emotionally salient components of memory are preferentially remembered at the expense of accompanying neutral information. This emotional memory trade-off is enhanced over time, and possibly sleep, through a process of memory consolidation. Sleep is believed to benefit memory through a process of reactivation during nonrapid eye movement sleep (NREM).

Age-related positivity effect in emotional memory consolidation from middle age to late adulthood.

Background: While younger adults are more likely to attend to, process, and remember negative relative to positive information, healthy older adults show the opposite pattern. The current study evaluates when, exactly, this positivity shift begins, and how it influences memory performance for positive, negative, and neutral information.

Methods: A total of 274 healthy early middle-aged (35-47), late middle-aged (48-59), and older adults (>59) viewed scenes consisting of a negative, positive, or a neutral object placed on a plausible neutral background, and rated each scene for its valence and arousal.

The influence of encoding strategy on associative memory consolidation across wake and sleep.

Sleep benefits memory consolidation. However, factors present at initial encoding may moderate this effect. Here, we examined the role that encoding strategy plays in subsequent memory consolidation during sleep.

The effects of cognitive reappraisal and sleep on emotional memory formation.

Emotion regulation (i.e. either up- or down-regulating affective responses to emotional stimuli) has been shown to modulate long-term emotional memory formation.

The functions of sleep: A cognitive neuroscience perspective.

This Special Feature explores the various purposes served by sleep, describing current attempts to understand how the many functions of sleep are instantiated in neural circuits and cognitive structures. Our feature reflects current experts' opinions about, and insights into, the dynamic processes of sleep. In the last few decades, technological advances have supported the updated view that sleep plays an active role in both cognition and health.

Sleep preferentially consolidates negative aspects of human memory: Well-powered evidence from two large online experiments.

Research suggests that sleep benefits memory. Moreover, it is often claimed that sleep selectively benefits memory for emotionally salient information over neutral information. However, not all scientists are convinced by this relationship [e.

Distinct stress-related changes in intrinsic amygdala connectivity predict subsequent positive and negative memory performance.

Experiencing stress before an event can influence how that event is later remembered. In the current study, we examine how individual differences in one's physiological response to a stressor are related to changes to underlying brain states and memory performance. Specifically, we examined how changes in intrinsic amygdala connectivity relate to positive and negative memory performance as a function of stress response, defined as a change in cortisol.

Memory for emotional images across sleep versus wake in school-aged children.

Sleep is important for emotional well-being, memory, and development in children. Regarding memory, sleep has been shown to advantage accuracy for declarative tasks but not procedural tasks. There is some evidence to suggest that sleep provides a relatively greater benefit for memory of negative emotional versus neutral images.

Sleep spectral power correlates of prospective memory maintenance.

Prospective memory involves setting an intention to act that is maintained over time and executed when appropriate. Slow wave sleep (SWS) has been implicated in maintaining prospective memories, although which SWS oscillations most benefit this memory type remains unclear. Here, we investigated SWS spectral power correlates of prospective memory.

Medial Prefrontal Cortex Has a Causal Role in Selectively Enhanced Consolidation of Emotional Memories after a 24-Hour Delay: A TBS Study.

Previous research points to an association between retrieval-related activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and preservation of emotional information compared with co-occurring neutral information following sleep. Although the role of the mPFC in emotional memory likely begins at encoding, little research has examined how mPFC activity during encoding interacts with consolidation processes to enhance emotional memory. This issue was addressed in the present study using transcranial magnetic stimulation in conjunction with an emotional memory paradigm.

Sleep Spindles Preferentially Consolidate Weakly Encoded Memories.

Sleep has been shown to be critical for memory consolidation, with some research suggesting that certain memories are prioritized for consolidation. Initial strength of a memory appears to be an important boundary condition in determining which memories are consolidated during sleep. However, the role of consolidation-mediating oscillations, such as sleep spindles and slow oscillations, in this preferential consolidation has not been explored.

Higher post-encoding cortisol benefits the selective consolidation of emotional aspects of memory.

Emotional experiences create durable memory traces in the brain, especially when these memories are consolidated in the presence of stress hormones such as cortisol. Although some research suggests cortisol elevation can increase long-term memory for emotional relative to neutral content, the impact of stress and cortisol on the consolidation of emotional and neutral aspects of memories when they are part of the same experience remains unknown. Here, after encoding complex scenes consisting of negative or neutral objects placed on neutral backgrounds, participants were exposed to a psychosocial stressor (or matched control condition) in order to examine the impact of stress and cortisol on early consolidation processes.

Slow oscillation-spindle coupling is negatively associated with emotional memory formation following stress.

Both stress and sleep enhance emotional memory. They also interact, with the largest effect of sleep on emotional memory being seen when stress occurs shortly before or after encoding. Slow wave sleep (SWS) is critical for long-term episodic memory, facilitated by the temporal coupling of slow oscillations and sleep spindles.

Sleep's benefits to emotional processing emerge in the long term.

Sleep benefits the long-term preservation of emotional memories, making them accessible even years after the emotional episode has occurred. However, whether sleep also influences the emotional response that gets elicited while retrieving such memories (e.g.

Overnight sleep benefits both neutral and negative direct associative and relational memory.

Strong evidence suggests that sleep plays a role in memory consolidation, which involves both stabilizing memory into long-term storage as well as integrating new information into existing stores. The current study investigated consolidation, across a day of wakefulness or night of sleep, of emotional and neutral directly learned visual paired associates (A-B/B-C pairs) as well as formation of memory for relational pairs formed via overlapping learned components (A-C pairs). Participants learned 40 negative and 40 neutral face-object pairs followed by a baseline test in session 1 either in the morning or evening.

Interactive effects of stress reactivity and rapid eye movement sleep theta activity on emotional memory formation.

Sleep and stress independently enhance emotional memory consolidation. In particular, theta oscillations (4-7 Hz) during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep increase coherence in an emotional memory network (i.e.

Acute sleep deprivation and the selective consolidation of emotional memories.

Research suggests that sleep preferentially consolidates the negative aspects of memories at the expense of the neutral aspects. However, the mechanisms by which sleep facilitates this emotional memory trade-off remain unknown. Although active processes associated with sleep-dependent memory consolidation have been proposed to underlie this effect, this trade-off may also be modulated by non-sleep-related processes, such as the circadian factors, stress-related factors, and/or mood congruent context effects involved in sleep deprivation.

Anxious, but not depressive, symptoms are associated with poorer prospective memory performance in healthy college students: Preliminary evidence using the tripartite model of anxiety and depression.

Prospective memory (PM) - or memory for tasks to be completed in the future - is essential for daily functioning. Although depression and anxiety have been shown to impair PM performance, few studies have explored the relative contributions of different symptom domains. Here, we examined the relation between anxiety, depression, negative mood, and PM performance using the tripartite model.

Post-encoding stress enhances mnemonic discrimination of negative stimuli.

Stress influences how we remember emotional events and how these events shape future behaviors. However, the impact of stress on memory specificity for emotional events has yet to be examined. To this end, the present study utilized a mnemonic discrimination task that taxes hippocampal pattern separation, the process of distinguishing between overlapping experiences, thereby allowing us to better understand the mechanisms by which stress affects gist versus detail memory of emotional events.

Do different salience cues compete for dominance in memory over a daytime nap?

Information that is the most salient and important for future use is preferentially preserved through active processing during sleep. Emotional salience is a biologically adaptive cue that influences episodic memory processing through interactions between amygdalar and hippocampal activity. However, other cues that influence the importance of information, such as the explicit direction to remember or forget, interact with the inherent salience of information to determine its fate in memory.

Preferential consolidation of emotionally salient information during a nap is preserved in middle age.

Sleep preferentially preserves aspects of memory that are most salient and valuable to remember at the expense of memory for less relevant details. Daytime naps and nocturnal sleep enhance this emotional memory trade-off effect, with memory for emotional components correlated with slow-wave sleep during the day and rapid eye movement sleep overnight. However, these studies have primarily sampled from young adult populations.

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory.

The Deese, Roediger and McDermott (DRM) task is a false memory paradigm in which subjects are presented with lists of semantically related words (e.g., nurse, hospital, etc.