Washington, Apr 18 : A new study has provided supporting evidence to the theory that sleep not only strengthens the content of a memory but also the particular order in which they were experienced, probably by a replay of the experiences in “forward” direction.

Previous findings confirmed the widely held view that long-term memories are formed particularly during sleep, and that this process relies on the brain replaying recently encoded experiences during the night.

The study was conducted by a research group headed by Jan Born at the University of Lübeck.

As part of this study, researchers asked students to learn triplets of words presented one after the other. Afterwards they slept, whereas in a control condition no sleep was allowed.

Later, recall was tested by presenting one word and asking which one came before and which one came after during learning.

Researchers found that sleep was found to enhance word recall, but only when the students were asked to reproduce the learned words in forward direction.

The study concluded that sleep associated consolidation of memories enforces the temporal structure of the memorized episode that otherwise might be blurred to a timeless puzzle of experiences.

The findings of the research were published in the April issue of the online journal of the Public Library of Science. (ANI)