Do dreams reflect memory processing?
Carlyle Smith, PhD There is now strong support for the idea that memory consolidation occurs during sleep states. One paradigm that has been used to demonstrate this relationship has been stimulus cueing. A salient cue is presented during acquisition of a task and then is presented again during sleep (without waking the organism) to remind the subject to process the recently acquired information. This technique has been reported to induce memory enhancement over normal levels in humans during REM sleep. The present study was done to examine the dream content during post-acquisition REM sleep. After an acclimatization night of sleep, 12 female undergraduate college students were asked to learn the Mirror Trace task, a task considered to involve REM sleep for memory consolidation. They were then placed in one of the following groups: Group 1 subjects were exposed to the sound of a ticking alarm clock during task acquisition. During the subsequent night of sleep they were presented with a
