Scientists have found giving rewards in period of learning and reinforcing with sleep or a short nap can be beneficial for people. Receiving rewards, accompanied by a 90-minute daytime nap, can aid to “cement” new facts and skills in the memory, a new study reveals.

Researchers say that as people sleep, the information associated with low rewards is transferred to regions of the brain linked with long-term memory. The findings show the significance of sleep to learning and “understanding the devastating effects that lack of sleep can have on achievement," they added.

"Rewards may act as a kind of tag, sealing information in the brain during learning," said lead researcher Dr Kinga Igloi from the University of Geneva. The study is to be published in the journal eLife, which the team believes will be beneficial for educators to provide new methods of teaching.

For the study, the researchers assigned 31 healthy volunteers between a sleep group and a wake group, with all participants assessed with equal sensitivity to receiving rewards. The researchers then scanned the brains of the volunteers during the training of remembering pairs of pictures.

Each group was told that they will receive a higher reward by remembering pairs in four of the eight series of the pictures shown. The researchers then gave a 90-minute break of either sleep or rest to the groups, followed by a test of recalling the pairs of the pictures and questions to rate their confidence about giving a correct answer.

Three months after the initial tests, the researchers asked the participants to take a surprise test with the exact similar nature. The results show that the performance of both wake and sleep group has improved for highly rewarded picture pairs, however, the sleep group was found to perform better overall.

The participants at the same group also showed more confidence of achieving a correct answer on the memory tests. The researchers conducted MRI scans to each groups and found that those who slept have greater activity on the hippocampus, a small region of the brain significant to form memories.

In the three-month gap of the tests, the results also show that the sleep group experienced an increased connectivity between the hippocampus, the medial prefrontal cortex and the striatum, which are the areas involved in memory consolidation and reward processing.

"We already knew that sleep helps strengthens memories, but we now also know that it helps us select and retain those that have a rewarding value," Igloi said. "It makes adaptive sense that the consolidation of memory should work to prioritise information that is critical to our success and survival."

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