Motor memory is an essential part of everyday life and essential for learning and retaining motorskills such as playing computer games, piano, driving a car and dancing. Difficulties executingmotor movements can have a significant impact on daily functioning. The exact mechanismsunderlying the formation of new motor memory is not entirely clear, and with this study, wewant to further develop our knowledge of how the motor memories are created. Convergingevidence that sleep plays a significant role in motor memory learning is already widely accepted,but there are still questions on which aspects of motor learning that are influenced by sleep, andwhat aspects of learning that could improve motor performance. Therefore, by using a motorsequence test for finger skills, we aimed to examine how positive feedback and sleep affectmotoric memory consolidation compared to wakefulness. In addition, we studied if there wereany gender differences in motor learning, as this has not been vastly researched. Usually,memory studies only carry out retrieval tests after a shorter period, a few hours to a day afterinitial learning. Retention of motor memories for a longer period which is highly relevant in dailylife has rarely been studied, and therefore this study also examined how stable the learned motormemories were after four weeks.
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