Sleep Links Gist Abstraction to Veridical Memory

Sleep is important for memory consolidation. By strengthening the original memory trace sleep may improve source memory, and thus the distinction between veridical and false memories. Simultaneously, sleep restructures memories and thereby may facilitate gist abstraction and thus enhance false memory generation. Here, this question is studied using the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm, where participants learn lists of semantically related words, constructed to lead to false retrieval of lure words (semantically linked to the lists, but never presented). Previous literature on sleep and false memories has been inconsistent, which might be due to variance in methodology, but can also be explained by low statistical power. In this large online study (sleep = 104, wake = 101, AM control = 99, PM control = 94), a preregistered replication of Diekelmann et al. (2010), we find no effect of sleep on false memories, nor on general memory performance. We also do not replicate the finding that sleep increases false memories when overall memory performance is low. Instead, we find that false memories increase after sleep when intrusion-adjusted memory performance is high. We interpret this as generalization process during sleep (gist), which helps to form veridical memory, but also generates false memories.