Editing Visual memory (section)

=== Sleep ===
Findings surrounding sleep and visual memory have been mixed. Studies have reported performance increases after a bout of sleep compared with the same period of waking. The implications of this are that there is a slow, offline process during sleep that strengthens and enhances the memory trace.<ref name="CAI">{{cite journal | last1 = Cai | first1 = D.J. | last2 = Jiang | first2 = Y.V. | last3 = Makovski | first3 = T. | last4 = Mednick | first4 = S.C. | year = 2009 | title = Sleep and rest facilitate implicit memory in a visual search task | journal = Vision Research | volume = 49 | issue = 21| pages = 2557–2565 | pmid = 19379769 | pmc = 2764830 | doi = 10.1016/j.visres.2009.04.011 }}</ref> Further studies have found that quiet rest has shown the same learning benefits as sleep. Replay has been found to occur during post-training quiet wakefulness as well as sleep. In a recent study where a visual search task was administered quiet rest or sleep is found to be necessary for increasing the amount of associations between configurations and target locations that can be learned within a day.<ref name="CAI" /> Reactivation in sleep was only observed after extensive training of rodents on familiar tasks. It rapidly dissipates; it also makes up a small proportion of total recorded activity in sleep.<ref name="CAI" /> 
It has also been found that there are gender differences between males and females in regards to visual memory and sleep. In a study done testing sleep and memory for pictures it was found that daytime sleep contributed to retention of source memory rather than item memory in females, females did not have recollection or familiarity influenced by daytime sleep, whereas males undergoing daytime sleep had a trend towards increased familiarity.<ref name="XB">{{cite journal | last1 = Fu | first1 = X. | last2 = Wang | first2 = B. | year = 2009 | title = Gender difference in the effect of daytime sleep on declarative memory for pictures | journal = Journal of Zhejiang University Science B | volume = 10 | issue = 7| pages = 36–546 | doi = 10.1631/jzus.B0820384 | pmid = 19585672 | pmc = 2704972 }}</ref> The reasons for this may be linked to different memory traces resulting from different encoding strategies, as well as with different electrophysiological changes during daytime sleep.<ref name="XB" />