Experimental procedure and behavioral results. (A) Experimental procedure of the main study. After preparation, participants studied 120 Dutch–German word pairs in the evening. Afterward, participants went to bed and slept for 8 h. During stable N2 and SWS, we presented two separate lists of 40 Dutch words. Forty words were not presented. In the morning, participants were tested on the German translation of the Dutch words again. (B) Behavioral results of the main study. We did not detect any memory differences between selective reactivation during N2 sleep (N2 TMR) and slow-wave sleep (SWS TMR). In addition, we did not observe a general memory benefit for reactivated versus not reactivated words (control). In addition, retrieval performance is reported as a percentage of correctly retrieved German translations, with performance set to 100% before sleep. Values are mean ± SEM. (C) Behavioral results of the additional study (n = 13; identical design except 3 h of sleep instead of 8 h). Similar to our main study, we were not able to find any memory differences between selective reactivation during N2 sleep (N2 TMR) and during slow-wave sleep (SWS TMR). Analogously, we did not observe a general memory benefit for reactivated versus not reactivated words (control). Retrieval performance is reported as a percentage of correctly retrieved German translations, with performance set to 100% before sleep. Values are mean ± SEM.
