Sleep Deprivation False Memories

Memory can also be affected by lack of sleep. Also peoples inability to remember things can be affected.

In a laboratory study of sleep deprivation, researchers employed a variety of techniques to keep volunteers awake for variable amounts of time. One group of participants was kept awake for 24 hours, and the other was kept awake for 48 hours. During periods of forced wakefulness, participants were required to engage verbal learning tasks such as memorizing the definitions of obscure English words. At the conclusion of the period of forced wakefulness, participants were allowed to sleep for as

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

Thesis: Sleep deprivation can lead to serious health problems, make you forget information, and have a negative impact on the outlook of life.

This paper examines five different sources of information that addresses information pertaining to wakeful resting or sleeping and the effects it has on memory garnered by experiments performed on humans and animals. Wakeful resting is defined as an individual that has not fallen asleep but has engaged in a period of rest that cuts them off from the distractions of the outside world. Sleep is the bodies natural cycle of rest that suspends the consciousness and allows both the body and the mind to take a break from any stressful activities and recover. By either taking a short wakeful rest or going to sleep after learning new material, memory consolidation in both humans and animals will be improved, and it is not limited to humans that

There have been many experiments performed trying to find the correlation between sleep and memory. One of these experiments has showed that different stages of sleep has different effects on memory for instance, not only has sleep been seen to combine new memory with old long-term memories, but also helps stabilize memory (Born & Rasch, 2013). Using the Memory Interference Test (MIT), Amir conducted an experiment to further confirm the conclusion that the sleep improves a person’s memory. The experiment compared the amount of correctly remembered pictures by a sample people who had eight hours of sleep compared to a sample with only four hours of sleep. The hypothesis is that there is a correlation between the amount of sleep a person

This article explains the importance of getting the perfect amount of sleep at night. The idea that sleeping for less than five hours or more than nine hours proves to have a negative effect on the human body. Sleep deprivation has a closely related link to memory retention and can cause a person to have trouble with daily task. The author continues to explain that not only is the brain effected by too little or too much sleep, but the rest of the body is also effected. Conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and even depression have links to not getting the perfect amount of sleep. The article concludes with listing tips to get the ideal amount of sleep at night, such as, going to sleep and waking up at the same time every day and limiting the amount of caffeine that is consumed throughout the day.

The article Sleep deprivation and false memories reported two studies, but only study one will be summarized here. The study done here is to see if amount of sleep is associated to false memories. This study is a correlational study because it is looking for the association of natural occurring variables (i.e. the amount of sleep one gets). The independent variable of this study is the amount of sleep the participants had, either they were sleep deprived or not. The dependent variable is whether or not they had false memories. The participants were made up of one hundred ninety-three undergraduates from the University of California, Irvine, 76% of which were female and 24% were male. The participants were divided into two different groups based on their self-reported sleep duration only on the night prior to the study session. The participants who reported five or fewer hours of sleep were put in the restricted sleep group, those with more than five hours were put into the reference group. Neither group differed meaningfully on age, gender, race-ethnicity etc.

This paper will discuss whether Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) is or is not induced by our sleep patterns and quality of sleep. Per the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (JCSM), Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) is defined as “a temporary memory loss characterized by an abrupt onset of anterograde (AGA) and retrograde amnesia (RA).” In other words, TGA occurs when there is a sudden occurrence of both Anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia at the same time. As defined by the JCSM, anterograde amnesia is “the acute inability to retain new information” and retrograde amnesia is “the significant reduction in the ability to recall past events. ” TGA has been known to last up to twenty-four hours. During the acute

Sleep is essential for optimal human function. In fact, a lack of sleep can actually affect important cognitive functions, like memory. A 2007 study added to the already substantial evidence that even acute total sleep deprivation impairs attentiveness, working memory, and reaction time in various tasks (Alhola, Polo-Kantola). One such way to further this investigation of the effects of sleep deprivation on memory is through the Memory Interference Test, or MIT. MIT is a program designed by Gaston Pfluegl, Ph.D., and Enrique Lopez, Psy. D., at UCLA to test the memory of students. Along with a memory test, the MIT also anonymously collected the physical states, mental states, and demographics of each student test subject, providing a substantial database through which students can test hypotheses, such as the connection between sleep deprivation and memory. Since the MIT requires short-term memory recall, the hours of sleep a student had before taking the test could have a noticeable effect on his or her performance. An unprecedented study this year found that sleep deprivation may actually even induce false memories, which would certainly impact a student taking the MIT because the test requires the subject to recognize images that have been previously presented to them (Frenda, et al). The hypothesis is that students who slept 8 hours before the test will perform better on the MIT than students who only slept 4 hours. The null hypothesis is that students who had adequate

79% of the participants were females and 21% were males. The four groups were spontaneously recovered memory group, recovered in therapy group, the continuous memory group, and the controlled group. Subjects in the spontaneously recovered memory group said they had forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse and then naturally recalled them outside of therapy. Those in the therapy recovered group said they recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse after therapy and by therapeutic techniques. Subjects in continuous memory group reported childhood sexual abuse and never forgot it. Those in the control group reported no history of abuse. Subjects within the groups were tested on false memory task and the FIA paradigm. In each of the ten trials of the false memory tasks, subjects studied a list of 15 words that were associated to a word not shown in the list. For example, bed, rest, and awake would be a part of the 15-word list that are related to sleep, the word that is not presented. In most cases, the subjects falsely recalled and recognized sleep as having been presented. To study previous knowledge of the subjects, the experimenters used a laboratory analogue that required the participants to recall information in qualitatively different ways. They studied a list of homographic words, followed by a context word. In test one, subjects were given a subset of a list with some of the letters in the target words cued with the same context word. In test two, subjects were asked whether they had recalled the given word in test one, which they often failed to recall. The procedure was different for each test. For the DRM test, participants would see lists of words on a screen and after viewing the words, they were asked to write the words down. The words stayed on the screen for three seconds and were then given two and a half minutes

Memories are important cognitive processes that are utilized every day. Research indicates that humans have both true and false memories. The question is: how do they differ? True memory enables individuals to recall past experiences with little distortion, while false memory allows individuals to recant situations and occupy any memory gaps with external information in order to truly believe that an event has occurred. In a day and age where memory distortion or memory loss is quite common, many people believe that it is quite easy to implant false memories. However, research has proven quite the opposite. Although it is possible, planting false memories is a difficult, time-consuming task,

In this article, researchers used three studies to attempt to determine if sleep affects declarative memory (Schönauer, Pawlizki, Köck, & Gais, 2014). The study seems to test an association between the variables of sleep and declarative memory, and the study attempts to make the casual claim that “Sleep does not preferentially consolidate a specific kind of declarative memory, but consistently promotes overall declarative memory formation” (Schönauer et al., 2014, para. 5). The overall validity of this experiments appears to be quite strong, as the researchers appeared to carefully measure their variables and prioritized the different validities in order to achieve an accurate result.

The article is about false memory. The researchers are trying to find out the effect of planting positive false memory in an individual. The authors of the article are; Cara Laney from University of Leicester, Erin K. Morris from University of California, Irvine, Daniel M. Bernstein from Kwantlen University College and University of Washington, Briana M. Wakefield from University of

The second study by Polzella, (1975) focused on the effects of sleep deprivation on memory. The author hypothesized that sleep deprivation increases the occurrence of lapses which prevents the encoding of items in memory. The method that was used to collect information was by having five males (one author and four participants), all their ages ranged from 21-32. Their sleeping habits for bed usually ranged from 10:30 pm- 12:00 pm and they would wake up typically at 6:00 am-8:00 am. The experiment was done individually where the participant sat in a small room with two fans and was presented visually on a cathode-ray tube run by a computer. Researchers conducted the experiment twice, the first time as a normal session and then as a sleep-deprived