Sleep Benefits Spatial Context Binding in Episodic Memory

The active systems consolidation hypothesis (Inostroza & Born, 2013; Klinzing et al., 2019) predicts that sleep compared to wakefulness benefits context binding in episodic memory for retention intervals of up to 12 hr. Extending previous research on sleep benefits in item-context associative memory, we investigated whether sleep also improves memory for context-context associations. In an online source-monitoring experiment, we used intentionally learned pictures as items and incidentally learned horizontal and vertical screen positions as context dimensions to compare context binding in source memory for retention intervals filled with natural night sleep versus daytime wakefulness. In line with the active systems consolidation hypothesis, multinomial modeling analyses revealed a significant sleep benefit in bound source memory for horizontal and vertical spatial locations of items. Hence, not only memory for item-context associations but also memory for context-attribute bindings benefits from sleep.