Prejudice May Be Unlearned With The Help Of Sleep

New findings published in the journal Science reveal the power of sleep and "un-teaching" prejudice. While it's not quite that simple, researchers at Northwestern university found that both conscious and unconscious biases could be "unlearned" as a result of what's called "counter-stereotype training."

The method involves exposing patients to distinctive sounds that are followed by a short period of sleep. Then, what they remember was found to be influenced if the learning-related sounds were also played during sleep.

"We call this Targeted Memory Reactivation, because the sounds played during sleep could produce relatively better memory for information cued during sleep compared to information not cued during sleep," said Ken Paller, senior author of the study and professor of psychology at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in a news release. "For example, we used this procedure to selectively improve spatial memory, such as learning the locations of a set of objects, and skill memory, like learning to play a melody on a keyboard."

For the study, researchers gave 40 volunteers the training, in which they were shown images of faces paired with words and the opposite of widely held stereotypes. For example, women's faces might be paired with words such as "science."

A distinctive sound was then played contrasting when the contrasting stereotypes were shown, and the sound was also played quietly while they slept without their knowledge.

Findings revealed that through this technique, bias could be reduced. Furthermore, the effects were still present a week later.

"It is somewhat surprising that the sleep-based intervention could have an impact that was still apparent one week later," concluded Xiaoqing Hu, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student at Northwestern when he began the study. "The usual expectation is that a brief, one-time intervention is not strong enough to have a lasting influence. It might be better to use repeated sessions and more extensive training. But our results show how learning, even this type of learning, depends on sleep."

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