Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How sleep affects memory in older adults is a critical topic,since age significantly impacts both sleep and memory. Fordeclarative memory, previous research reports contradictoryresults, with some studies showing sleep-dependent memoryconsolidation and some other not. We hypothesize that thisdiscrepancy may be due to the use of recall as the memorymeasure, a demanding task for older adults. The present paperfocuses on the effect of sleep on relearning, a measure thatproved useful to reveal subtle, implicit memory effects.Previous research in young adults showed that sleeping afterlearning was more beneficial to relearning the same Swahili-French word pairs 12 hours later, compared with the sameinterval spent awake. In particular, those words that could notbe recalled were relearned faster when participants previouslyslept. The effect of sleep was also beneficial for retention aftera one-week and a 6-month delay. The present study used thesame experimental design in older adults aged 71 on averagebut showed no significant effect of sleep on consolidation, onrelearning, or on long-term retention. Thus, even when usingrelearning speed as the memory measure, the consolidatingeffect of sleep in older adults was not demonstrated, inalignment with some previous findings.