The Role of Sleep in Cognition and Emotion

As critical as waking brain function is to cognition, an extensive literature now indicates that sleep supports equally important, different yet complementary operations. This review will consider recent and emerging findings implicating sleep and specific sleep-stage physiologies in the modulation, regulation, and even preparation of cognitive and emotional brain processes. First, evidence for the role of sleep in memory processing will be discussed, principally focusing on declarative memory. Second, at a neural level several mechanistic models of sleep-dependent plasticity underlying these effects will be reviewed, with a synthesis of these features offered that may explain the ordered structure of sleep,…