Does overnight memory consolidation support next-day learning?

Guttesen, Anna Á. V., Harrington, Marcus O., Gaskell, M. Gareth and Cairney, Scott A. (2025) Does overnight memory consolidation support next-day learning? Cognition, 264. ISSN 0010-0277

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Abstract

Sleep supports memory consolidation and next-day learning. The Active Systems model of consolidation proposes that sleep facilitates a shift in the memory retrieval network from hippocampus to neocortex in service of long-term storage. Accordingly, overnight consolidation may support efficient next-day learning. We tested this hypothesis across two preregistered behavioural experiments. In both experiments, participants learned a set of word pairs and recall was assessed before and after a 12-h delay containing overnight sleep or daytime wakefulness. Participants then learned and were immediately tested on a new set of word pairs. Word pair retention was better after the delay of sleep than wakefulness, suggesting a benefit of sleep for memory consolidation, but there was no sleep-related learning advantage for the new set of word pairs. Sleep-associated consolidation was not associated with next-day learning in our preregistered analyses, although a significant positive relationship with learning did emerge in an exploratory analysis that accounted for performance at pre-sleep recall. Taken together, our findings provide exploratory evidence that overnight consolidation may be linked to new learning, with pre-sleep retrieval performance influencing the magnitude of this relationship.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability: Study data and analysis scripts can be retrieved here: https://osf.io/qbeh3/, pre-registrations: https://osf.io/khwzm & https://osf.io/jywvz. Funding information: This work was supported by a Medical Research Council Career Development Award (MR/P020208/1), a University of York Department of Psychology Doctoral Studentship, and by a Royal Society Research Grant (RG/R1/241079).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	12-12 design,encoding capacity,memory consolidation,sleep,paired-associates learning,preregistered,open data,memory consolidation,12–12 design,paired-associates learning,sleep,preregistered,encoding capacity,open data,experimental and cognitive psychology,developmental and educational psychology,cognitive neuroscience,language and linguistics,linguistics and language,3* ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3200/3205
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	08 Jul 2025 11:30
Last Modified:	10 Aug 2025 06:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99861
DOI:	10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106241

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