Declarative and Non-declarative Memory Consolidation in Children with Sleep Disorder

Healthy sleep is essential in children’s cognitive, behavioral, and emotional development. However, remarkably little is known about the influence of sleep disorders on different memory processes in childhood. Such data could give us a deeper insight into the effect of sleep on the developing brain and memory functions and how the relationship between sleep and memory changes from childhood to adulthood. In the present study we examined the effect of sleep disorder on declarative and non-declarative memory consolidation by testing children with sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) which is characterized by disrupted sleep structure. We used a story recall task to measure declarative memory and Alternating Serial Reaction time (ASRT) task to assess non-declarative memory. This task enables us to measure two aspects of non-declarative memory, namely general motor skill learning and sequence-specific learning. There were two sessions: a learning phase and a testing phase, separated by a 12 h offline period with sleep. Our data showed that children with SDB exhibited a generally lower declarative memory performance both in the learning and testing phase; however, both the SDB and control groups exhibited retention of the previously recalled items after the offline period. Here we showed intact non-declarative consolidation in SDB group in both sequence-specific and general motor skill. These findings suggest that sleep disorders in childhood have a differential effect on different memory processes (online vs. offline) and give us insight into how sleep disturbances affects developing brain.