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Memory consolidation was first referred to in the writings of the renowned Roman teacher of rhetoric Quintillian.He noted the "curious fact... that the interval of a single night will greatly increase the strength of the memory," and presented the possibility that "... the power of recollection .. undergoes a process of ripening and maturing during the time which intervenes."
Phenomena in memory associated with repetition, word frequency, recency, forgetting, and contiguity, among others, can be easily explained in the realm of multiple trace theory. Memory is known to improve with repeated exposure to items. For example, hearing a word several times in a list will improve recognition and recall of that word later on.
Specifically, sleep's unique properties enhance memory consolidation, such as the reactivation of newly learned memories during sleep. For example, it has been suggested that the central mechanism for consolidation of declarative memory during sleep is the reactivation of hippocampal memory representations.
REM is associated with the consolidation of nondeclarative (implicit) memories. An example of a nondeclarative memory would be a task that we can do without consciously thinking about it, such as riding a bike. Slow-wave, or non-REM (NREM) sleep, is associated with the consolidation of declarative (explicit) memories.
For example, in a word-completion implicit memory task, if a subject reads a list containing the word "dog", the subject provides this word more readily when asked for three-letter words beginning in "d". The levels-of-processing effect is only found for explicit memory tests.
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Researchers use a variety of tasks to assess older children and adults' memory. Some examples are: Paired associate learning – when one learns to associate one specific word with another. For example, when given a word such as "safe" one must learn to say another specific word, such as "green". This is stimulus and response. [70] [71]
Sleep differentially affected the memory consolidation of the two lists, enhancing more significantly, the memory for the first list. [7] It has been suggested that it is mainly the degree of initial learning that predicts whether spontaneous recovery shall occur, stating that the better the learning of the A-B associations, the more likely ...