Sleeping in between study sessions may make easier to recall and relearn read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/677-sleeping-in-between-study-sessions-may-make-easier-to-recall-and-relearn

Getting some sleep in between study sessions may make it easier to recall what you studied and relearn what you've forgotten, even 6 months later.

Previous research suggested that, sleeping in between study sessions might make the relearning process more efficient, reducing the effort needed to commit information to memory.

Psychological scientist Stephanie Mazza of the University of Lyon, and his colleagues put forward that sleeping in between study sessions might make the relearning process more efficient, reducing the effort needed to commit information to memory.

A total of 40 French adults were randomly assigned either a “sleep” group or a “wake” group.  At the first session, all participants were presented with 16 French-Swahili word pairs in random order. Any words that were not correctly translated were presented again, until each word pair had been correctly translated.

Kindly, participants in (wake group) completed the first session in the morning and second session in the evening of the same day, and others (sleep group) completed the first session in the evening, slept, and completed the second session the following morning.

The data told Participants who had slept between sessions recalled about 10 of the 16 words, while those who hadn't slept recalled only about 7.5 words. when it came to relearning, those who had slept needed only about 3 trials to be able to recall all 16 words, while those who had stayed awake needed about 6 trials.

Follow-up data showed that participants in the sleep group performed very little forgetting, recalling about 15 word pairs, compared to the wake group, who were able to recall about 11 word pairs. This benefit was still noticeable 6 months later.

The results suggest that, alternating study sessions with sleep might be an easy and effective way to remember information over longer periods of time with less study.