Can Sleep Enhance both Implicit and Explicit Processes?

This experiment examined the effects of sleep on learning, while employing an experimental design that minimizes time of day and fatigue effects. Using a modified two-phase contextual cuing task, we show that sleep benefits consolidation and offline learning minimally, and hindered subsequent conscious awareness on an explicit memory test. These differential effects of sleep on implicit learning and explicit memory can be taken as evidence that these types of information are processed differently and based on entirely distinct memory stores.