Research Article Sleep Preferentially Enhances Memory for Emotional Components of Scenes

ABSTRACT—Central aspects of emotional experiences are often well remembered at the expense of background de-tails. Previous studies of such memory trade-offs have fo-cusedonmemoryafter brief delays, but little is knownabout how these components of emotional memories change over time. We investigated the evolution of memory for negative scenes across 30 min, 12 daytime hours spent awake, and 12 nighttime hours including sleep. After 30 min, negative objects werewell remembered at the expense of information about their backgrounds. Time spent awake led to forget-ting of the entire negative scene, with memories of objects and their backgrounds decaying at similar rates. Sleep, in contrast, led to a preservation of memories of negative objects, but not their backgrounds, a result suggesting that the two components undergo differential processing durin