Consolidation of sensorimotor adaptation depends both on the passage of time and sleep

Contrary to its well-established role in declarative learning the impact of sleep on motor memory consolidation remains a subject of debate. Motor learning involves skill acquisition (motor skill learning, MSL) and skill recalibration (sensorimotor adaptation, SMA). Current literature suggests that whereas MSL benefits from sleep SMA consolidation depends solely on the passage of time. This led to the proposal that SMA may be an exception to other types of memories. Here, we address this ongoing controversy in humans through three comprehensive experiments. We found that when training occurs sparsely throughout the daytime SMA consolidation proceeds independently of sleep. However, when sleep is aligned with the memory stabilization window, a 30% memory enhancement emerges along with a distinct modulation of neural markers of sleep consolidation. Our findings reconcile apparent conflicting viewpoints regarding the active role of sleep in procedural motor learning and point to common mechanisms supporting consolidation across memory domains. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.