Abstract Mkid 161

In past studies on the relationship between sleep and episodic memory, enhanced recall performance has usually been observed with short retention intervals of eight hours of sleep or waking. Experiments addressing the question as to whether this effect is also detectable for longer retention intervals of 16 hours up to six days have been scarce and particularly inconclusive. The present study therefore examined free and cued recall of a categorized word list in a 2 _ 2 design, completely between subjects, with a period of either sleep or wakefulness following initial learning and the recall test administered either seven or 72 hours later. Results indicated superior memory performance after the long, but not after the short retention interval.