Are you sleeping in class?
One of the new research says that “Nodding off in class
may not be such a bad idea after all”. New research from the University of
Notre Dame shows that going to sleep shortly after learning new material is
most beneficial for recall.
Learning
Best When You Rest (Sleeping After Processing New Info Most
Effective)
Notre Dame Psychologist Jessica Payne and colleagues
studied 207 students who habitually slept for at least six hours per night.
Participants were randomly assigned to study declarative, semantically related
or unrelated word pairs at 9 a.m. or 9 p.m., and returned for testing 30
minutes, 12 hours or 24 hours later. Declarative memory refers to the ability
to consciously remember facts and events, and can be broken down into episodic
memory (memory for events) and semantic memory (memory for facts about the
world). People routinely use both types of memory every day -- recalling where
we parked today or learning how a colleague prefers to be addressed.
At the 12-hour retest, memory overall was superior
following a night of sleep compared to a day of wakefulness. However, this
performance difference was a result of a pronounced deterioration in memory for
unrelated word pairs; there was no sleep-wake difference for related word
pairs. At the 24-hour retest, with all subjects having received both a full
night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, subjects' memories were superior
when sleep occurred shortly after learning, rather than following a full day of
wakefulness.
"Our study confirms that sleeping directly after
learning something new is beneficial for memory. What's novel about this study
is that we tried to shine light on sleep's influence on both types of
declarative memory by studying semantically unrelated and related word
pairs," Payne says.
"Since we found that sleeping soon after learning
benefited both types of memory, this means that it would be a good thing to
rehearse any information you need to remember just prior to going to bed. In
some sense, you may be 'telling' the sleeping brain what to consolidate."
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