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Younger people might want to get a good night's rest to have their memory work efficiently.  A new study suggests that sleep may be more important for memory storage in young people than it is in older adults.

The research was presented the American Psychology Association meeting and is currently being reviewed for publication.

Researchers gave nearly 100 people as young as 18 and as old as 84 a memory task. The task involved learning to associate pairs of words. Participants learned the words and returned 12 hours later for a memory test.

Some of the participants learned the words in the evening and went home and slept before the test, wearing a device that monitored brain waves and determined stages of sleep.

According to researchers, young people performed better on a memory test following a night's sleep, indicating that sleep was helpful in storing their memories.

The older adults performed about the same on the memory test regardless of whether they had slept before the test. Researchers say this might be because older adults got about half as much slow-wave sleep. Slow-wave sleep is a stage of deep sleep that has been shown to be important for memory consolidation.

However, researchers say improving memory in older adults is not as simple as increasing the stage of deep sleep. They also said it's not fully known why older adults do not benefit from sleep as younger people, although it could be because of changes to the brain and the way how the different areas communicate.

Researchers say they hope to do more research to get the link between sleep and memory working again in older adults.