How Sleep Shapes Learning—and Why That Matters for Games
At its core, my research explores how people learn and adapt to new challenges, particularly how sleep facilitates the consolidation of complex skills. I investigate how different sleep stages and brain activity patterns (like sleep spindles) contribute to learning and generalization—essentially, how the brain refines skills and integrates new information into existing knowledge structures.
Why does this matter for gaming? Because game design is fundamentally about learning—whether it’s mastering a control scheme, understanding an enemy’s attack pattern, or adapting to a dynamically changing world. My research provides insights into how players optimize performance, how memory consolidation might impact skill acquisition, and even how game mechanics could be designed to reinforce learning over time.
Just as my work uncovers how sleep helps players retain and generalize perceptual skills (like recognizing speech in different accents), the same principles apply to how players internalize mechanics, strategies, and narratives in games. Understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms of learning can inform the design of tutorials, difficulty curves, and progression systems—creating experiences that feel intuitive, rewarding, and immersive.
By bridging cognitive science and gaming, I bring a research-driven perspective to how games can be designed to maximize engagement, challenge, and skill mastery.
The crux of my dissertation: how does sleep support generalized perceptual learning?
… first let’s do some defining.
What is Auditory Generalized Perceptual Learning, and Why Does It Matter?
Auditory generalized perceptual learning refers to our ability to improve at recognizing and understanding sounds—even when they vary from what we’ve encountered before. Unlike rote memorization, this type of learning allows us to adapt to new accents, unfamiliar speech patterns, and other variations in auditory input. This skill is critical in real-world communication, where speech is rarely identical from one conversation to the next. Understanding how we generalize learning is not just important for linguistics and education but also for designing more adaptive and accessible auditory experiences in interactive media.
Perceptual Learning Timeline
Why Is It Important to Know How Sleep Supports Learning?
Learning doesn’t just happen while we’re awake—our brains continue processing information while we sleep. Research suggests that specific sleep stages play distinct roles in memory consolidation, refining and strengthening neural connections that help us retain and apply knowledge. By understanding which features of sleep contribute to learning, we can optimize training, education, and even interactive experiences to better align with how the brain encodes information over time.
My research explores how sleep facilitates the consolidation of generalized perceptual learning—how we retain and apply skills to new challenges. Specifically, I investigate how different sleep stages, including slow-wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, contribute to learning and adaptation.
What Did We Find?
Through EEG analysis, we found that both SWS and REM play critical roles in consolidating perceptual learning. SWS, often linked to synaptic downscaling and memory stabilization, likely helps refine neural connections, prioritizing the most relevant information for long-term storage. Meanwhile, REM sleep—associated with integrating new knowledge into existing cognitive frameworks—may help strengthen the ability to generalize what’s learned to new situations. Together, these findings suggest that learning isn’t just about acquiring new skills in the moment; it’s about how the brain organizes and optimizes them after the fact.
What Do These Results Mean?
These findings suggest that effective learning isn’t just about acquiring skills during wakefulness—it’s about how the brain processes and optimizes those skills during sleep. By demonstrating that both SWS and REM contribute to perceptual generalization, our study provides evidence that memory consolidation is a multi-stage process, requiring distinct but complementary mechanisms to stabilize and integrate learning. It suggests that for this type of skill learning, that shorter naps (that frequently don’t contain these deeper stages of sleep – SWS and REM – are likely not provide the scaffolding needed for consolidation. This has implications not only for education but also for any field where individuals need to adapt to new auditory information, such as language learning, speech recognition technologies, and immersive media experiences.