# Time Course of Sleep Inertia Dissipation in Memory Tasks
## 2 Materials and Methods
### Tasks  
All cognitive tasks were computerized. _Lexical decision task_ (semantic memory system). Nine lists were created, each made up of 80 stimuli that included 40 words and 40 non-words. The words were related to concrete objects and items and were balanced across lists on the basis of length (number of letters and syllables) and frequency (expressed in the percentage of appearance and usage in the Italian culture). Each stimulus appeared in white against a black foreground and they were written in Courier New font 30. The participants were instructed to press the spacebar on a keyboard as fast as possible when they detected an Italian word on the screen; when presented with a non-word, they were required to avoid any response. In any case, both word and non-word stimuli remained on the screen for 500 ms. In order to assess to what extent semantic memory was automatically activated through the embedding of semantic priming, 10 prime words and 10 target words were included in the Italian words section of the list; each section, therefore, contained 20 related words (the 10 prime-target pairs) and 20 unrelated words. The prime words were semantically related to, and immediately preceded by, the target words, e.g., prime: bamboo (doll), target: palla (ball). Unrelated words might be pasta (pasta) and arte (art). The words were balanced across lists in terms of length and frequency. The non-words (for example, \"namoi\") were legible stimuli but were meaningless in Italian. These non-word stimuli were created modifying the words used in a list (e.g., for non-words in list 1 we modified the words of list 4, just changing the order of vowels and consonants). In the task, a white fixation cross appeared for 500 ms in the center of the screen, and then a stimulus (word or non-word) appeared in the center of the screen. After a participant's response or elapsed time, a new trial started. In each list, a pseudorandom presentation of the stimuli was created with the following rules: the target stimulus appeared after its relative prime stimulus and no more than three consecutive non-words were presented. All task lasted about 10 min. We measured the mean RTs for word recognition, priming effect, i.e., the RT difference between the recognition of the prime word and the target word, and accuracy expressed as a percentage. _Word list free recall_ (episodic memory system). A single word, in white color against a black foreground written in Courier New 30, was presented centrally on the screen for 500 ms. The participants were instructed to read the word presented and write it on a sheet of paper. When this was done, they had to press the spacebar, after which another word appeared on the screen. Thus, each word appeared for a short duration, but participants had enough time to write the word and to decide when a new word was presented, by pressing the spacebar. This procedure was repeated for all 15 words. Each word was disyllabic (e.g., naso [nose], prete [priest], or lardo [lard]), referred to objective items (no abstract concepts were used), and balanced for frequency (see before) across lists. At the end of the word list, the participants were instructed to read all the words they had written in a serial order, and to hand over the sheet at the end. After a one-minute break, the experimenter gave the start signal, and the participants had to recall the words in a free order for 3 min. For this task, nine lists were created. Given that participants determined the timing of appearance of words, this task lasted about 10 min. In this task, we counted the number of correctly recalled words. _Finger tapping task_ (procedural memory system). The participants had to learn a sequence of five keys using at least three fingers of their left hand (non-dominant hand). We created nine sequences. Each sequence, composed of five keys, was made up of a combination of four arrow keys on the keyboard. In each sequence, the first and last keys were identical. The task included a learning phase and a recall phase.