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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on February 9, 2005
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi043
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Article

The Functional Anatomy of Sleep-dependent Visual Skill Learning

Matthew P. Walker 1, Robert Stickgold 2, Ferenc A. Jolesz 3, and Seung-Schik Yoo 3*

1 Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, Center for Sleep and Cognition, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
2 Center for Sleep and Cognition, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
3 Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Seung-Schik Yoo, E-mail: yoo{at}bwh.harvard.edu


  Abstract

Learning of procedural skills develops gradually, with performance improving significantly with practice. But improvement on some tasks, including a visual texture discrimination task, continues in the absence of further practice, expressly during periods of sleep and not across equivalent waking episodes. Here we report that the brain activation revealed significantly different patterns of performance-related functional activity following a night of sleep relative to 1 h post-training without intervening sleep. When task activation patterns after a night of sleep were compared with activation patterns without intervening sleep (1 h post-training), significant regions of increased signal intensity were observed in the primary visual cortex, the occipital temporal junction, the medial temporal lobe and the inferior parietal lobe. In contrast, a region of decreased signal intensity was found in the right temporal pole. Corroborating these condition differences, correlations between behavioural performance and brain activation revealed significantly different patterns of performance-related functional activity following a night of sleep relative to those without intervening sleep. Together, these data provide evidence of overnight bi-directional changes in functional anatomy, differences that may form the neural basis of sleep-dependent learning expressed on this task.

Keywords: memory; plasticity; sleep; visual skill learning.
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