Sleep Makes Learning & Relearning Easier, Researchers Say
Whether you are preparing for a university exam or a tough presentation at work, scientists suggest one simple trick to make sure you easily remember what you’ve studied - get enough sleep. The new findings, published in the Psychological Science journal, found that getting sleep between study sessions not only helps you recall what you studied but also helps you relearn what you’ve already forgotten.
For the study, 40 French adults were randomly assigned to either a "sleep" group or a "wake" group. They all went through a ‘recall task’ after. At the first session, all participants were presented with 16 French-Swahili word pairs in random order. After studying a pair for 7 seconds, the Swahili word appeared and participants were prompted to type the French translation. The correct word pair was then shown for 4 seconds. Any words that were not correctly translated were presented again, until each word pair had been correctly translated.
Importantly, some participants completed the first session in the morning and the second session in the evening of the same day ("wake" group); others completed the first session in the evening, slept, and completed the second session the following morning ("sleep" group).
In the first session, the two groups showed no difference in how many words they could initially recall or in the number of trials they needed to be able to remember all 16 word pairs. But after 12 hours, those who had slept between sessions recalled about 10 of the 16 words, on average, while those who hadn’t slept recalled only about 7.5 words. And when it came to relearning, those who had slept needed only about 3 trials to be able to recall all 16 words, while those who had stayed awake needed about 6 trials.
The findings revealed that sleeping between sessions seemed to last over time.
Follow-up data showed that participants in the sleep group outperformed their peers on the recall test 1 week later. The sleep group showed very little forgetting, recalling about 15 word pairs, compared to the wake group, who were able to recall about 11 word pairs. This benefit was still noticeable 6 months later.
"Our results suggest that interleaving sleep between practice sessions leads to a twofold advantage, reducing the time spent relearning and ensuring a much better long-term retention than practice alone," said psychological scientist Stephanie Mazza of the University of Lyon. "Previous research suggested that sleeping after learning is definitely a good strategy, but now we show that sleeping between two learning sessions greatly improves such a strategy." Mazza and her team concluded that alternating study sessions with sleep might be an easy and effective way to remember information over longer periods of time with less study.
Source of this article:
Relearn Faster and Retain Longer Along With Practice, Sleep Makes Perfect
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