Sleep plays a crucial role in memory consolidation. However, the influence of sleep on emotional memory consolidation in older adults, especially in the context of associative memory, which is more cognitively demanding than item memory, remains elusive. For this study we recruited young and older adults, and randomly assigned them into the sleep or wake condition. They were administrated a visual-spatial associative memory task, which required them to remember a picture and its location. We measured memory performance for positive, neutral, and negative stimuli before and after a 12-h interval of being awake or asleep. An accuracy analysis indicated a beneficial effect of sleep on location memory regardless of age and valence. In addition, in a more fine-grained analysis, the drift rate from diffusion modeling showed that sleep facilitated the consolidation of negative stimuli in young adults, while this emotion bias shifted to positive stimuli in older adults. Moreover, negative correlations were observed between the change of memory performance and sleep characteristics in older adults, indicating that more sleep results in fewer negative memories. Our results provide a relatively weak support for an age-related emotional bias in the context of associative memory, manifested in the absence of an age-by-valence interaction in accuracy, whilst a modeling parameter in consideration of both accuracy and response time yielded evidence consistent with the predictions of the socioemotional selectivity theory.

中文翻译：

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年龄相关的情感偏见在联想记忆巩固中：睡眠的作用。

睡眠在内存整合中起着至关重要的作用。然而，睡眠对老年人情绪记忆巩固的影响，尤其是联想记忆比对项目记忆的认知要求更高，尤其是在联想记忆的情况下。在这项研究中，我们招募了年轻人和老年人，并将他们随机分配到睡眠或唤醒状态。他们执行了视觉空间联想记忆任务，要求他们记住图片及其位置。我们在清醒或入睡的12小时间隔前后测量了积极，中性和消极刺激的记忆表现。准确性分析表明，无论年龄和效价，睡眠对位置记忆都是有益的。此外，在更细粒度的分析中，扩散模型的漂移率表明，睡眠促进了年轻人中负刺激的巩固，而这种情绪偏向则转变为老年人中的正刺激。此外，在老年人的记忆力变化与睡眠特征之间观察到负相关，表明更多的睡眠导致更少的负记忆。我们的结果为联想记忆中与年龄有关的情绪偏见提供了相对较弱的支持，表现为在准确性方面没有按年龄的相互作用，而同时考虑准确性和响应时间的建模参数产生了证据与社会情感选择性理论的预测相一致。而这种情绪上的偏见转变为老年人的积极刺激。此外，在老年人的记忆力变化与睡眠特征之间观察到负相关，表明更多的睡眠导致更少的负记忆。我们的结果为联想记忆中与年龄有关的情绪偏见提供了相对较弱的支持，表现为在准确性方面没有按年龄的相互作用，而同时考虑准确性和响应时间的建模参数产生了证据与社会情感选择性理论的预测相一致。而这种情绪上的偏见转变为老年人的积极刺激。此外，在老年人的记忆力变化和睡眠特征之间观察到负相关，表明更多的睡眠会导致更少的负记忆。我们的结果为联想记忆中与年龄有关的情绪偏见提供了相对较弱的支持，表现为在准确性方面没有按年龄的相互作用，而同时考虑准确性和响应时间的建模参数产生了证据与社会情感选择性理论的预测相一致。