The architecture of sleep undergoes distinct changes during childhood and early adolescence. Slow wave sleep is involved in memory processing and may support active consolidation of newly encoded representations to support the formation of abstracted "gist" memories. Here, we examined sleep and overnight memory formation in German school children (n = 33) between 7 and 15 years of age, after the encoding phase of a verbal Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task. Effects of age were analyzed on sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) signatures of memory processing during nonrapid eye movement (NonREM) sleep, and the overnight formation of veridical and gist-based memories. Increasing age decreases time spent in slow wave sleep, and slow wave activity, whereas density and amplitude of fast sleep spindles in NonREM sleep were increased. Moreover, fast spindles were more consistently and more closely coupled to the upstate of the slow oscillation in the older children. Also, veridical and gist-based recall of words after sleep increased with age. Notably, a closer slow oscillation upstate-fast spindle coupling predicted veridical recall of words, and this relationship was found independent of age. Memory performance in the sleeping children did not differ from that of an age-matched control group (n = 32) tested over a daytime wake retention interval, with adolescents even showing superior veridical recall after wake. Our findings suggest that slow oscillation-spindle coupling as a mechanism of sleep-dependent memory formation becomes increasingly relevant during childhood and early adolescence. However, wake-associated mechanisms similarly effective in forming medium-term memory exist in this age as well. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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儿童期和青春期早期的睡眠脑电图 (EEG) 振荡和相关的记忆处理。

睡眠结构在童年和青春期早期经历了明显的变化。慢波睡眠参与记忆处理，并可能支持新编码表征的主动巩固，以支持抽象“要点”记忆的形成。在这里，我们检查了 7 至 15 岁德国学童 (n = 33) 在口头 Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) 任务的编码阶段后的睡眠和夜间记忆形成情况。研究人员分析了年龄对非快速眼动（NonREM）睡眠期间记忆处理的睡眠脑电图（EEG）特征以及真实记忆和主旨记忆的夜间形成的影响。年龄的增加会减少慢波睡眠和慢波活动的时间，而非快速眼动睡眠中快速睡眠纺锤波的密度和幅度则增加。此外，在年龄较大的儿童中，快速纺锤波与慢振荡的北部更一致、更紧密地相关。此外，随着年龄的增长，睡后对单词的真实且基于要点的回忆也会增加。值得注意的是，更接近的慢振荡上高速主轴耦合预测了单词的真实回忆，并且发现这种关系与年龄无关。睡眠儿童的记忆表现与在白天清醒保留间隔内测试的年龄匹配对照组（n = 32）没有差异，青少年甚至在醒来后表现出更好的真实回忆。我们的研究结果表明，慢振荡-纺锤体耦合作为睡眠依赖性记忆形成的机制，在儿童期和青春期早期变得越来越重要。然而，在这个时代也存在与唤醒相关的机制，在形成中期记忆方面同样有效。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。