We investigate the role of sleep for visual perception and learning. Our main focus is how sleep supports the extraction and abstraction of statistical regularities from visual experiences. To adress these questions, we measure behavioral performance, high-density EEG, and polysomnography in healthy human volunteers. Our studies indicate that sleep specifically optimizes memory representations for effective and efficient prediction of the environment.

Sleep and stimulus-response learning

Simple associations between visual stimuli and motor responses are surprisingly complex and long-lived. Together with Florian Waszak (Paris), we investigate whether and how sleep supports the consolidation of different memory traces which collectively account for stimulus-response learning.

Sleep and generalization of perceptual learning

Simple forms of visual perceptual learning have long been assumed to be highly specific, e.g., to the trained location in the visual field. Recent results have cast doubts on this assumption. We investigate whether these discrepant findings may be linked to sleep-dependent consolidation of perceptual learning.

Sleep and visual gist abstraction

We have previously shown that sleep supports the abstraction and consolidation of prototypical information from series of abstract visual stimuli across intervals of up to one year. In follow-up experiments, we investigate when this process of abstraction happens and how it is supported by sleep.

Occipital sleep spindles predict sequence learning in a visuo-motor task. Lutz, N. D., Admard, M., Genzoni, E., Born, J., & Rauss, K., SLEEP, August 2021 [PubMed]

Anatomic and functional asymmetries interactively shape human early visual cortex responses. Herde, L., Uhl, J., & Rauss, K., Journal of Vision, June 2020 [PubMed]

Binocular disparity-based learning is retinotopically specific and independent of sleep. Klinzing, J. G., Herbrik, L., Nienborg, H., & Rauss, K., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, May 2020 [PubMed]

Sleep Strengthens Predictive Sequence Coding. Lutz, N. D., Wolf, I., Hübner, S., Born, J., & Rauss, K., Journal of Neuroscience, October 2018 [PubMed]

Sleep Supports the Slow Abstraction of Gist from Visual Perceptual Memories. Lutz, N. D., Diekelmann, S., Hinse-Stern, P., Born, J., & Rauss, K., Scientific Reports, February 2017 [PubMed]