Effect of sleep on memory for binding different types of visual information

Visual long-term memory has a large and detailed storage capacity for individual scenes, objects, and actions. Sleep can enhance declarative memory of information, with sleep strengthening associations between item and context. However, the fidelity of the representation is currently underexplored. Experiments 1a and 1b tested effects of sleep on binding objects and scenes, and Experiments 2-3 tested binding of actions and scenes. Participants viewed composites and were tested 12-hours later after a delay consisting of sleep (9pm-9am) or wake (9am-9pm), on an alternative forced choice recognition task. For object-scene composites sleep did improve recognition compared to an equivalent period of wake. For action-scene composites, there was no significant effect observed, with recognition at chance level, suggesting issues with initial encoding. Sleep can promote binding in memory, depending on the type of information to be combined.