People with Parkinson's disease (pwPD) often present difficulty consolidating newly learned skills into long-term memory. Sleep facilitates motor memory consolidation in healthy adults, especially in combination with targeted memory reactivation (TMR). TMR works by adding associated sounds during learning that are replayed during sleep and thus reinforce the recently formed neural connections. Importantly, recent work suggested that consolidation during sleep may be preserved in pwPD, but robust findings are lacking and have not involved TMR. The objective of the present study is to address this imperative question by investigating the effect of napping on motor memory consolidation by experimentally manipulating exposure to sleep and TMR for the first time. Concretely, the investigators will first compare the effect of a 2-hour nap to that of a wake control period in pwPD and healthy age-matched controls. A validated motor sequence learning task will be used to test for behavioral markers of motor learning and polysomnography with electroencephalography (EEG) will be conducted to study the neural correlates of sleep-related motor learning effects. In a second experiment, the investigators will then test the effects of adding TMR during post-learning sleep, by comparing performance on two motor sequences of which only one is reactivated during post-learning napping using auditory TMR.
Age range
40 Years
Sex
ALL
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Experiment 1 - MSL single task: Offline consolidation
Timeframe: Change in PI between the first 4 blocks immediately after the 2-hour NAP or WAKE intervention (Retest 1) and the last 4 blocks of learning immediately prior to the intervention.
Experiment 1 - MSL single task: Retention
Timeframe: Change in PI between the first 4 blocks after the 24-hour retention period (Retest 2) and the last 4 blocks of Retest 1 immediately after the 2-hour NAP or WAKE intervention.
Experiment 2, SRT single task: Offline consolidation
Timeframe: Change in PI between the first 4 blocks immediately after the nap+TMR intervention (Retest 1) and the last 4 blocks of learning immediately prior to the intervention.
Experiment 2, SRT single task: Retention
Timeframe: Change in PI between the first 4 blocks after the 24-hour retention period (Retest 2) and the last 4 blocks of Retest 1 immediately after the 2-hour NAP+TMR intervention.