Nighttime sleep benefits the prospective component of prospective memory

Böhm, Mateja F.; Bayen, Ute J.; Pietrowsky, Reinhard · 2021 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/s13421-021-01187-w

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Summary

This study investigates whether nighttime sleep specifically benefits the prospective component of prospective memory (PM), which involves remembering that an intention exists, as opposed to the retrospective component, which involves remembering what to do and when. While sleep’s benefits for retrospective memory are well-established, it remains unclear if sleep improves PM performance solely through retrospective mechanisms or if it also aids the prospective component. The authors tested three theoretical mechanisms: retrospective-memory consolidation, consolidation of the intention–context association, and refreshed attention. The researchers employed a 2 × 2 mixed design with a between-subjects factor of group (sleep vs. wake) and a within-subjects factor of session (first vs. second). Participants performed an event-based PM task embedded in an ongoing color-matching task. In the first session, participants completed the task after a 3-minute retention interval. In the second session, they performed the task after a 12-hour retention interval. The sleep group slept during this interval, while the wake group remained awake. To disentangle the prospective and retrospective components, the authors used multinomial processing tree (MPT) modeling, which provides statistically independent estimates for the probability of remembering the intention (prospective) and recognizing the target cue (retrospective). The results indicated no significant effect of sleep on the retrospective component, likely due to time-of-day effects rather than memory consolidation. However, sleep significantly benefited the prospective component. Specifically, the prospective component declined less strongly after the retention interval filled with sleep compared to the interval filled with wakefulness. The data supported a hybrid interaction pattern: in the first session, the wake group performed better than the sleep group, but in the second session, the sleep group outperformed the wake group. This pattern aligns with the "refreshed attention" hypothesis, suggesting that sleep restores attentional resources necessary for the prospective component of PM. The findings did not support the hypothesis that sleep consolidates the association between the intention and its context, as this would have produced an ordinal interaction rather than the observed hybrid interaction. These findings clarify the mechanisms by which sleep enhances prospective memory. They demonstrate that sleep benefits the prospective component—the unique aspect of PM involving intention maintenance—primarily through the refreshing of attentional resources rather than through the consolidation of intention–context associations. This distinction is significant for understanding the cognitive processes underlying PM and highlights the role of attentional restoration in maintaining intentions over long retention intervals. The study provides empirical evidence that sleep’s benefit to PM is not merely a byproduct of improved retrospective memory but involves specific support for the prospective monitoring processes.

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• prospective memory interruptions