During evening practice sessions, 32 nonpianist musicians learned a short melody on piano, and then either learned a second short piano melody, learned a difficult unfamiliar piece on their principal instruments, practiced familiar material on their principal instruments, or engaged in no other music-related motor behavior prior to sleep; practice…

Recent research has shown that both the speed and accuracy of novel motor skills improve during sleep in a process called consolidation. Such off-line learning in the absence of practice as yet has been experimentally observed only with learners performing relatively simple tasks. In the experiment we report here, we tested whether experienced…

Using two sequential key press sequences, we tested the extent to which subjects' performance on a digital piano keyboard changed between the end of training and retest on subsequent days. We found consistent, significant improvements attributable to sleep-based consolidation effects, indicating that learning continued after the cessation of…