Young and Older Adults Benefit From Sleep, but Not From Active Wakefulness for Memory Consolidation of What-Where-When Naturalistic Events

An extensive psychological literature shows that sleep actively promotes human episodic memory (EM) consolidation in younger adults. However, evidence for the benefit of sleep for EM consolidation in aging is still elusive. In addition, most of the previous studies used EM assessments that are very different from everyday life conditions and are far from considering all the hallmarks of this memory system. In this study, the effect of an extended period of sleep was compared to the effect of an extended period of active wakefulness on the EM consolidation of naturalistic events, using a novel (What-Where-When) EM task, rich in perceptual details and spatio-temporal context, presented in a virtual environment. We investigated the long-term What-Where-When and Details binding performances of young and elderly people before and after an interval of sleep or active wakefulness. Although we found a noticeable age-related decline in EM, both age groups benefited from sleep, but not from active wakefulness. In younger adults, only the period of sleep significantly enhanced the capacity to associate different components of EM (binding performance) and more specifically the free recall of what-when information. Interestingly, in the elderly, sleep significantly enhanced not only the recall of factual elements but also associated details and contextual information as well as the amount of high feature binding (i.e., What-Where-When and Details). Thus, this study evidences the benefit of sleep, and the detrimental effect of active wakefulness, on long-term feature binding, which is one of the core characteristics of EM, and its effectiveness in normal aging. However, further research should investigate whether this benefit is specific to sleep or more generally results from the effect of a post-learning period of reduced interference, which could also concern quiet wakefulness.