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Many people have claimed that sleep has helped them solve a difficult problem, but empirical support for this assertion remains tentative. The current experiment tested whether manipulating information processing during sleep impacts problem incubation and solving. In memory studies, delivering learning-associated sound cues during sleep can reactivate memories. We therefore predicted that reactivating previously unsolved problems could help people solve them. In the evening, we presented 57 participants with puzzles, each arbitrarily associated with a different sound. While participants slept overnight, half of the sounds associated with the puzzles they had not solved were surreptitiously presented. The next morning, participants solved 31.7% of cued puzzles, compared with 20.5% of uncued puzzles (a 55% improvement). Moreover, cued-puzzle solving correlated with cued-puzzle memory. Overall, these results demonstrate that cuing puzzle information during sleep can facilitate solving, thus supporting sleep’s role in problem incubation and establishing a new technique to advance understanding of problem solving and sleep cognition.
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Overlearning of non-native speech sounds does not result in superior consolidation after a period of sleep
Recent studies suggest that sleep-mediated consolidation processes help adults learn non-native speech sounds. However, overnight improvement was not seen when participants learned in the morning, perhaps resulting from native-language interference. The current study trained participants to perceive the Hindi dental/retroflex contrast in the morning and tested whether increased training can lead to overnight improvement. Results showed overnight effects regardless of training amount. In contrast to previous studies, participants in this study heard sounds in limited contexts (i.e., one talker and one vowel context), corroborating other findings, suggesting that overnight improvement is seen in non-native phonetic learning when variability is limited.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1735225
- PAR ID:
- 10593610
- Publisher / Repository:
- Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Volume:
- 147
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0001-4966
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. EL289-EL294
- Size(s):
- p. EL289-EL294
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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