Research suggests that sleep plays a vital role in memory. We tested the impact of total sleep deprivation on adults’ memory for a newly learned writing system and on their ability to generalise this knowledge to read untrained novel words. We trained participants to read fictitious words printed in a novel artificial orthography, while depriving them of sleep the night after learning (Experiment 1) or the night before learning (Experiment 2). Following two nights of recovery sleep, and again 10 days later, participants were tested on trained words and untrained words, and performance was compared to control groups who had not undergone sleep deprivation. Participants showed a high degree of accuracy in learning the trained words and in generalising their knowledge to untrained words. There was little evidence of impact of sleep deprivation on memory or generalisation. These data support emerging theories which suggest sleep-associated memory consolidation can be accelerated or entirely bypassed under certain conditions, and that such conditions also facilitate generalisation.

研究表明，睡眠在记忆中起着至关重要的作用。我们测试了完全睡眠剥夺对一个新近学习的写作系统对成年人记忆的影响，以及对他们将这种知识泛化为阅读未经训练的新颖单词的能力的影响。我们训练了参与者阅读虚构的人工拼字法中印制的虚构词，同时使他们在学习后的晚上（实验1）或学习前的晚上（实验2）失去睡眠。在恢复睡眠两个晚上之后，再过10天后，对参与者进行训练有素的单词和未经训练的单词的测试，并将其表现与未经历睡眠剥夺的对照组进行比较。参与者在学习训练有素的单词并将其知识推广到未训练的单词方面表现出很高的准确性。几乎没有证据表明睡眠剥夺对记忆或泛化有影响。这些数据支持新出现的理论，这些理论表明与睡眠相关的内存整合可以在某些条件下被加速或完全绕开，并且这种条件也有助于推广。