Skip to content

Incorporation of presleep stimuli into dream contents: evidence for a consolidation effect on declarative knowledge during REM sleep?

Carlo Cipolli, Igino Fagioli, Michela Mazzetti, Giovanni Tuozzi

Journal of Sleep Research December 1, 2004 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2869.2004.00420.x (opens in new tab)

Read Full Text
Relevant Not relevant

Study at a glance

AI-extracted from the abstract
Characteristics Experimental study Peer reviewed
Sample size 12
Population Human participants
Duration One night, with morning recall after spontaneous awakening
Topics Dreaming
Key findings Dream contents that incorporate presleep stimuli are better retained in morning recall than other dream contents, though word-level recall of the stimuli themselves is not significantly improved.

Abstract

Presleep stimuli to be retained for further recall is often incorporated into dream contents. To establish whether processing for insertion into dream contents may improve consolidation, we compared the retention rate at delayed recall of contents resulting from incorporation of presleep sentence-stimuli with those of other contents of the same dream experiences. We hypothesized that association with a cognitive task of recall facilitates access to recently acquired items of declarative knowledge such as presleep stimuli, and triggers the deep elaboration of their semantic features, which involves rehearsal. Twelve subjects were given a task of delayed recall for three nonsense sentences delivered once a time before each of the sleep (re-)onsets over an experimental night. After each awakening in rapid eye movement sleep, subjects were asked to report dream experience and recall the sentence to be retained. In the morning, after spontaneous awakening, subjects were unexpectedly requested to again report their dream experiences and to recall the stimuli. Two pairs of judges independently identified possible incorporations of the stimuli, and parsed dream reports into propositional content units. The proportion of night reports with at least one incorporation of the stimulus delivered (i.e. valid incorporations) was higher than that of reports with contents similar to a stimulus(-i) not yet delivered (forward pseudo-incorporations) or delivered prior to an earlier sleep period (backward pseudo-incorporations). The proportion of content units common to night and morning reports (considered to be better consolidated) was significantly higher for incorporated contents than for other contents, including pseudo-incorporated contents. Instead, the retention at morning recall of words of sentence-stimuli corresponding to incorporated contents was not significantly higher than that of other words. The better retention of incorporated contents provides a partial confirmation (that is, limited to the output of the processing) that a generation effect, which benefits retention of actively processed information, is operative during sleep as well as in waking.

Comparable studies

Other experimental studies on dreaming, most cited first.

Study Year Design Participants
Lucid Dreaming Verified by Volitional Communication during Rem Sleep Selected subjects proficient in lucid dreaming 1981 Experimental study n = 5
Slow Wave Sleep Dreaming Fifty volunteers sleeping in a sleep laboratory 1992 Observational study with counterbalanced within-subject awakenings n = 50
Incorporation of concern- and nonconcern-related verbal stimuli into dream content. Seven male subjects studied during sleep Stages 2 and REM 1981 Experimental study n = 7
Lucid Dreaming and Alpha Activity: A Preliminary Report Good dream recallers 1982 Experimental study n = 10
Lucid dreaming during NREM sleep: Two case reports 2012 Sleep laboratory study

Citations in the library

Cited by 20

and 15 more in the library

Cites 7

and 2 more in the library

Related reading

Explore topics

Dreaming Mystical experience