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. 2020 Jun 24;9:e53730. doi: 10.7554/eLife.53730

Figure 1. Study design and behavioral results.

(A) Longitudinal study design. Participants were recorded during childhood (blue) and adolescence (red). Recording periods were separated by 7 years. Participants underwent two full-night ambulatory polysomnographies in their habitual sleep environment at both time points respectively. The first night served adaptation purposes. At the following experimental night, participants performed a declarative word pair learning task during which they encoded and recalled semantically non-associated word pairs before sleep. The post-sleep recall was separated by a 10 hr (childhood) and 8 hr sleep during the retention interval (adolescence). (B) Word pair task design. Participants encoded 50 word pairs during childhood (blue) and 80 word pairs during adolescence (red). Every word pair presentation was followed by a fixation cross. Participants were instructed to imagine a visual connection between the two words. Timing parameters are indicated in the respective colors for childhood (blue) and adolescence (red). During the recall trial, only the first word of the word pair was presented and participants had to recall the corresponding word. Participants received no performance feedback. (C) Behavioral results for the word pair task. Performance was measured as percentage of correctly recalled word pairs. Participants showed a higher performance during adolescence. Black circles indicate individual recall scores.

Figure 1.

Figure 1—figure supplement 1. Additional behavioral analyses.

Figure 1—figure supplement 1.

(A) Correlation of sleep-dependent memory consolidation between childhood and adolescence (rho = −0.01, p=0.965). (B) Direct comparison of sleep-dependent memory consolidation (delayed recall – immediate recall; mean ± SEM) between childhood and adolescence. There was no significant difference between childhood and adolescence (t(32) = −1.43, p=0.161, d = −0.35). (C) Comparison of memory consolidation between the sleep and wake condition during adolescence (delayed recall – immediate recall; mean ± SEM). Memory consolidation in the sleep condition was superior to the wake condition (t(30) = 6.04, p<0.001, d = 1.08). Please note that data of a wake condition were only available for 31 instead of 33 subjects during adolescence.