LESSWRONG
LW

All of psycs's Comments + Replies

Does the _timing_ of practice, relative to sleep, make a difference for skill consolidation?
psycs60

The reference for the Robertson paper is: Brown, R. M., & Robertson, E. M. (2007). Off-line processing: reciprocal interactions between declarative and procedural memories. Journal of Neuroscience, 27(39), 10468-10475.

Reply
Does the _timing_ of practice, relative to sleep, make a difference for skill consolidation?
Answer by psycs200

I researched this topic a little as it was related to work I was doing in my PhD 2-3 years ago. I'm mostly going from memory here. I think Kaufman is largely incorrect for skill learning in real-life. Walker et al. (2002) found sleep improved motor skill compared to the same amount of time spent awake, but a similar improvement was found after nightime sleep whether participants learned at 10 am or 10pm.

Walker study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627302007468

Possibly, Kauffman based his claim on Robertson's studies wh... (read more)

Reply
3Eli Tyre
Finally, I'm curious what people make of the last paper psychs listed ("Testing Sleep Consolidation in Skill Learning: A Field Study Using an Online Game"). They didn't find any evidence for a sleep consolidation effect over and above non-sleep breaks. This is a very surprising result, and I'm not sure what to make of it. They give some possible reasons for that result in the discussion section, but none of them reduce my surprise much.
3Eli Tyre
The link for the Robertson paper is broken for me. Can you post the full title?
3Eli Tyre
A verbal task and a motor task can interfere with each other? I thought that interference only occurs between similar tasks.
8Eli Tyre
Thank you! The Walker study is exactly what I was looking for. For those following along at home, this is the relevant graph. It looks like a sleep session produces a comparatively huge boost in skill performance, regardless of the timing of the practice. Now I want to know if this has replicated for larger (or just other) samples.