Evanston (Illinois): A new study by Northwestern University has found that sleep reactivates memory and helps in face and name learning.
The paper titled, 'Targeted memory reactivation of face-name learning depends on ample and undisturbed slow-wave sleep' was published in the Nature partner journal, 'NPJ: Science of Learning'.
The researchers found that people's name recall improved significantly when memories of newly learned face-name associations were reactivated while they were napping. The key to this improvement was an uninterrupted deep sleep. "It's a new and exciting finding of sleep, because it tells us that the way information is reactivated during sleep to improve memory storage is linked with high-quality sleep," said lead author Nathan Whitmore, a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program at Northwestern.
