Sleep helps consolidation of a complex motor-learning task

July, 2010

Another study demonstrating the benefits of sleep for learning motor skills (in this case, a popular video game called "Guitar Hero III".

A number of studies have shown the benefits of sleep for consolidating motor learning. A new study extends this research to a more complex motor task: "Guitar Hero III", a popular video game. There was significantly greater improvement after a night’s sleep (average 68% in performance accuracy vs 63% for students who learnt the task in the morning and were tested in the evening), and a significant correlation between sleep duration and the amount of improvement.

Reference: 

Higginson, C.D. et al. 2010. So you wanna be a rock star? Sleep on it. Presented at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC, in San Antonio, Texas.

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