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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Roger Whittaker, Dr Vandy Dhawan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
We investigated whether the benefit of slow wave sleep (SWS) for memory consolidation typically observed in healthy individuals is disrupted in people with accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF) due to epilepsy. SWS is thought to play an active role in declarative memory in healthy individuals and, furthermore, electrographic epileptiform activity is often more prevalent during SWS than during wakefulness or other sleep stages. We studied the relationship between SWS and the benefit of sleep for memory retention using a word-pair associates task. In both the ALF and the healthy control groups, sleep conferred a memory benefit. However, the relationship between the amount of SWS and sleep related memory benefits differed significantly between the groups. In healthy participants, the amount of SWS correlated positively with sleep-related memory benefits. In stark contrast, the more SWS, the smaller the sleep-related memory benefit in the ALF group. Therefore, contrary to its role in healthy people, SWS-associated brain activity appears to be deleterious for memory in patients with ALF. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Author(s): Atherton KE, Nobre AC, Lazar AS, Wulff K, Whittaker RG, Dhawan V, Lazar ZI, Zeman AZ, Butler CR
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Cortex
Year: 2016
Volume: 84
Pages: 80-89
Print publication date: 01/11/2016
Online publication date: 12/09/2016
Acceptance date: 29/08/2016
Date deposited: 16/12/2016
ISSN (print): 0010-9452
ISSN (electronic): 1973-8102
Publisher: Elsevier BV
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2016.08.013
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2016.08.013
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