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Sketchpad Series

Spontaneous brain activity during sleep reduces subjective and objective visual recognition misalignment

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Fumiaki Sato¹ (fumiaki.sato@riken.jp), An Saotome¹, Ryosuke Katsumata¹, Mami Yamaji¹, Takeru Matsuda^1,2, Masako Tamaki^1,3; ¹RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Japan, ²The University of Tokyo, Japan, ³RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research, Japan

How sleep changes insightful visual recognition remains a mystery. Prior knowledge, mediated by higher-order functions in the frontal cortex, has been shown to influence perceptual processing in the visual cortex for better visual recognition. However, it is unclear whether the sleeping brain reshapes this process and if so, how. Importantly, previous studies have not dissociated detection accuracy from subjective recognition, the neural processes of which may differ. By developing a novel task that dissociates these two, we tested the mechanisms of reshaping recognition during sleep. We recruited young, healthy adult participants. Before and after a 90-minute nap or break with polysomnography, they were presented with various types of binarized images and were asked to respond whether they had recognized the images via two-alternative forced choice and to report the content. Our results showed that the conditional probability (the likelihood that participants correctly recognized an image, given they reported they recognized it) was significantly improved only after the nap; that is, subjective recognition was more consistent with detection accuracy. We applied sparse modeling to investigate the relationship between performance and functional connectivity among brain regions in the theta band activity. Functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and visual cortex showed positive regression coefficients with changes in conditional probability. Thus, sleep plays a critical role in improving subjective recognition and detection accuracy, by bringing them into closer alignment. This effect is driven by theta-band functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and visual cortex, which may reshape perceptual processes during sleep.

Topic Area: THINKING: Problem solving