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Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep

Sleep consolidates memory and promotes generalization in adults, but it is still unknown to what extent the rapidly growing infant memory benefits from sleep. Here we show that during sleep the infant brain reorganizes recent memories and creates semantic knowledge from individual episodic experienc...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Friedrich, Manuela, Wilhelm, Ines, Born, Jan, Friederici, Angela D.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Pub. Group 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4316748/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25633407
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7004
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author Friedrich, Manuela
Wilhelm, Ines
Born, Jan
Friederici, Angela D.
author_facet Friedrich, Manuela
Wilhelm, Ines
Born, Jan
Friederici, Angela D.
author_sort Friedrich, Manuela
collection PubMed
description Sleep consolidates memory and promotes generalization in adults, but it is still unknown to what extent the rapidly growing infant memory benefits from sleep. Here we show that during sleep the infant brain reorganizes recent memories and creates semantic knowledge from individual episodic experiences. Infants aged between 9 and 16 months were given the opportunity to encode both objects as specific word meanings and categories as general word meanings. Event-related potentials indicate that, initially, infants acquire only the specific but not the general word meanings. About 1.5 h later, infants who napped during the retention period, but not infants who stayed awake, remember the specific word meanings and, moreover, successfully generalize words to novel category exemplars. Independently of age, the semantic generalization effect is correlated with sleep spindle activity during the nap, suggesting that sleep spindles are involved in infant sleep-dependent brain plasticity.
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spelling pubmed-43167482015-02-13 Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep Friedrich, Manuela Wilhelm, Ines Born, Jan Friederici, Angela D. Nat Commun Article Sleep consolidates memory and promotes generalization in adults, but it is still unknown to what extent the rapidly growing infant memory benefits from sleep. Here we show that during sleep the infant brain reorganizes recent memories and creates semantic knowledge from individual episodic experiences. Infants aged between 9 and 16 months were given the opportunity to encode both objects as specific word meanings and categories as general word meanings. Event-related potentials indicate that, initially, infants acquire only the specific but not the general word meanings. About 1.5 h later, infants who napped during the retention period, but not infants who stayed awake, remember the specific word meanings and, moreover, successfully generalize words to novel category exemplars. Independently of age, the semantic generalization effect is correlated with sleep spindle activity during the nap, suggesting that sleep spindles are involved in infant sleep-dependent brain plasticity. Nature Pub. Group 2015-01-29 /pmc/articles/PMC4316748/ /pubmed/25633407 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7004 Text en Copyright © 2015, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
Friedrich, Manuela
Wilhelm, Ines
Born, Jan
Friederici, Angela D.
Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep
title Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep
title_full Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep
title_fullStr Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep
title_full_unstemmed Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep
title_short Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep
title_sort generalization of word meanings during infant sleep
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4316748/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25633407
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7004
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