Sleep Benefits Prose Memory Consolidation in University Students

Background/Objectives: Sleep plays a pivotal role in memory consolidation, especially for declarative memory. While extensive research has examined sleep's impact on simple declarative materials, such as word lists, its effect on more complex narrative passages remains less studied. This study aimed to investigate the effect of sleep on prose memory consolidation. Methods: In a within-subjects design, 10 healthy university students (6 F, 4 M; age range = 19-29; generation ratio = 0.8) learned prose passages and were tested both immediately and after a retention interval spent either asleep or awake. Results: The analyses revealed a positive effect of sleep, with the participants recalling more textual details in the Sleep condition (R² conditional = 0.269). Correlational analyses further supported this outcome, showing a positive association between specific sleep features (i.e., sleep cycles) and prose memory performance (r² = 0.56). Conclusions: Our finding suggests that sleep facilitates the consolidation of complex declarative memory traces, counteracting the decay that occurs during wakefulness; correlational analyses further support this outcome. Overall, these findings underscore the importance of sleep for everyday learning and comprehension, particularly when processing complex textual information.