Sound sleep improves motor learning skills

TORONTO - Sound sleep may help you become a “Guitar Hero”, a complex motor learning task, suggests a new study.

The “Guitar Hero” is a series of music video games first published in 2005 by RedOctane and distributed by Activision, in which players use a guitar-shaped peripheral to simulate the playing of lead, bass and rhythm guitars.

Results indicate that the improvement in performance accuracy on “Guitar Hero III” was greater after a night of sleep than after a similar length of daytime wakefulness.

At acquisition, participants played about 61 percent of the notes correctly. Performance accuracy improved to 63 percent in the wake condition and 68 percent in the sleep condition.

There was a significant correlation between sleep duration and the total improvement across sleep.

“Consistent with previous studies, these results demonstrate a significant link between sleep and motor learning,” said principal investigator Kevin Peters, associate professor in psychology at Trent University, Canada.

“Our results extend this link to include more complex and ecologically-valid tasks. This is important as these results indicate that sleep can help consolidate the skills that people encounter in their daily lives,” said Peters.

Peters, lead author Caitlin Higginson and their research team studied college students of both genders with a mean age of 20 years. Participants completed both the wake (9 a.m. to 9 p.m.) and sleep (9 p.m. to 9 a.m.) conditions, which were separated by one week.

For each condition they played one of two songs on the Activision video game “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock” until they reached an accuracy level of 50 to 75 percent.

After the 12-hour interval they played the song twice at retest. Sleep duration was measured by actigraphy.

Activision Publishing Inc. reports that in 2009 “Guitar Hero” was one of the top-five best-selling franchises across all video game platforms in the US and Europe.

Consumers worldwide have purchased more than 38 million units of the game since the original “Guitar Hero” was released in 2005.

Peters added that he plans to continue using the popular video game to study the relationship between sleep and learning, said a Trent University release.

The research abstract was presented Wednesday in San Antonio, Texas, at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.