Does overnight memory consolidation prepare the brain for next-day learning?

Harrington, Marcus O., Guttesen, Anna Á. V., Gaskell, M. Gareth and Cairney, Scott A. (2026) Does overnight memory consolidation prepare the brain for next-day learning? BMJ Open Respiratory Research, 13 (1). ISSN 2052-4439

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Abstract

Introduction: Sleep supports memory consolidation and next-day learning. The Active Systems Consolidation (ASC) model proposes that sleep facilitates a shift in retrieval-dependency from the hippocampus to the neocortex, promoting the integration of recent experiences into long-term storage and restoring the hippocampus’s capacity to encode new information the following day. We tested the hypothesis that greater overnight consolidation is associated with superior next-day learning of hippocampus-dependent memories. Methods: In two preregistered online experiments, participants completed two sessions separated by a 12-h delay of either overnight sleep (sleep group) or daytime wakefulness (wake group; combined dataset: n=238, age=23.44±3.51 years). In both experiments, participants first encoded a set of word pairs and completed a cued recall test both before and after the delay, providing a behavioural index of memory consolidation. Participants next learned a new set of word pairs and were immediately tested on them, allowing us to assess next-day learning performance (figure 1A). Results: Memory retention was significantly greater following sleep than wakefulness (Exp 1: t=3.19, p=.002, d=0.60; Exp 2: t=4.26, p<.001, d=0.77; figure 1B), consistent with sleep’s role in supporting memory consolidation. However, there was no sleep-related learning advantage for word pairs encoded after the delay, and no significant relationship was observed between overnight retention and next-day learning in our preregistered analyses (all p>.05). In an exploratory analysis combining both experiments and statistically controlling for baseline learning, greater retention was associated with better subsequent learning in the sleep group (r=.22, p=.020; figure 1C), but not the wake group (r=.13, p=.16). Discussion: Our results suggest that sleep facilitates memory consolidation, but offer limited support for the idea that overnight consolidation directly facilitates next-day learning. The exploratory evidence that a relationship may exist when baseline learning ability is accounted for warrants further research that equates initial encoding strength across participants.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	sleep,memory
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Related URLs:	https://bmjopenrespres.bmj.com/content/1...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	12 May 2026 09:28
Last Modified:	14 May 2026 15:17
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102955
DOI:	10.1136/bmjresp-2026-BSS.16

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