Walker/Sleep and memory formation: BBS Call for Commentators

[Behavioral & Brain Sciences]

     Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article

 A refined model of sleep and the time course of memory formation
         
                             by
 
                     Matthew P. Walker


http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Walker-12042002/Referees/

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open
Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the
biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be
considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate
commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate,
please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to:

                     calls at bbsonline.org

The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation
(indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on
every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to
comment, or to suggest someone to comment.

If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate
(there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work
to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are
eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS
Associates is available at this location to help you select a name:

http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html

(please note that this list is being updated)

If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to
ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your
name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an
unaffiliated investigator.)

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                           ** IMPORTANT **
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To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most
helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you
would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would
anticipate commenting upon.

(Please note that we only request expertise information in order to
simplify the selection process.)

Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation,
indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list,
which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of
prior commentaries in BBS.

To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows
the abstract and keywords below.

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A refined model of sleep and the time course of memory formation

Matthew P. Walker
Department of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School

ABSTRACT: Research in the neurosciences continues to provide evidence that
sleep plays a role in the processes of learning and memory. There is less
of a consensus, however, regarding the precise stage of memory development
where sleep is considered a requirement, simply favorable, or not
important. This article begins with an overview of recent studies
regarding sleep and learning, predominantly in the procedural memory
domain, and is measured against our current understanding of the
mechanisms that govern memory formation. Based on these considerations, a
new neurocognitive framework of procedural learning is offered, consisting
firstly of acquisition, followed by two specific stages of consolidation,
one involving a process of stabilization, the other involving enhancement,
whereby delayed learning occurs. Psychophysiological evidence indicates
that initial acquisition does not fundamentally rely on sleep. This also
appears to be true for the stabilization phase of consolidation, with
durable representations, resistant to interference, clearly developing in
a successful manner during time awake (or just time per se). In contrast,
the consolidation stage resulting in additional/enhanced learning in the
absence of further rehearsal does appear to rely on the process of sleep,
with evidence for specific sleep-stage dependencies across the procedural
domain. Evaluations at a molecular, cellular and systems level currently
offer several sleep specific candidates that could play a role in
sleep-dependent learning. These include the up regulation of select
plasticity-associated genes, increased protein synthesis, changes in
neurotransmitter concentration, and specific electrical events in neuronal
networks that modulate synaptic potentiation.

KEYWORDS: Consolidation; Enhancement; Learning; Memory; Plasticity; Sleep;
Stabilization

http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Walker-12042002/Referees/

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                *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT ***

(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

    In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
    to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
    limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
    it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
    year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
    biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
    would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

    (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
    basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
    indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
    nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
    potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
    impact!).


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Jeffrey Gray - Editor
Paul Bloom - Editor
Barbara Finlay - Editor

Behavioral and Brain Sciences
bbs at bbsonline.org
http://www.bbsonline.org
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