The Importance Of Sleep Deprivation On Memory

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

An article in Nature Neuroscience from February 2009 describes an experiment which was conducted regarding sleep and its correlation to memory. Memory was impaired after 35 hours of sleep deprivation weekly and constant shallow sleep. Regular sleep benefits memory as newly stored information is easily encoded. Proper sleep is crucial for processing and retaining new information. Those who suffer from sleep deprivation struggle to maintain new information and with comprehension skills. In order for students to maximize their learning capabilities, they need the proper sleep to be mentally prepared for

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.

Most studies are about discovering the contributors of false memories. However, this study focuses on how sleep deprivation contributes to false memories even though many studies argue that sleep deprivation damages cognitive function. Their study went in detail by researching the effect encoding have during this process. They found that if a participant was sleep deprived during event encoding; he or she would increase the likelihood of falsifying memories. However, when the participant was sleep deprived after encoding had already occurred then there was no big impact on falsifying memories. These experiments are conducted on the effect of sleep deprivation contributing to false memories since false memories can have dreadful consequences.

A greater understanding of these complex and dynamic brain states has helped clarify the ways in which sleep enhances memory processing. An increasing number of sleep studies have behaviourally assessed the facilitative role of REM and NREM sleep on declarative and procedural memory performance in humans. The preliminary results provided initial evidence to the idea that hippocampal-dependent declarative memories, such as memories of personal events and fact-based information, are facilitated by NREM sleep (specifically SWS) and hippocampal-independent procedural memories are facilitated by REM sleep (Plihal & Born, 1997).

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

Frenda, Patihis, Loftus, Lewis and Fenn’s (2014) article titled “Sleep Deprivation and False Memories sought out to explanation how sleep deprivation can have a role in an individual’s cognitive function. One-way researchers went about unraveling this particular question was to uncover the invisible knowledge relating the formation of false memories with sleep deprivation. Two experiments were executed diving into the many ways that sleep deprivation can affect a person’s thoughts and general decisions, using many examples.

After looking deeper into the topic of false memory, researchers decided to look into sleep deprivation and what happens to the brain and the body when a person becomes or is sleep deprived. They found that sleep deprivation impairs your everyday performance and ability to do a cognitive task. When it comes to memory, researchers found that sleep deprivation can decrease your working memory and its capacity. That means sleep deprivation can affect how you learn and what you learn and also can affect your functioning to review past learned information. After getting background information and gaining more knowledge about how false memories can be made, it was time to experiment for themselves and make their own results. Within their experiments, they drew a data set by using one hundred and ninety-three undergraduates at the University of California, Irvine and made them take a questionnaire that included passages with traumatic events, that were on the News. Then they assembled pictures for the participants to look at and text for them to

Ever wonder why you can’t remember things you should or why you are having trouble concentrating? You probably did not get enough sleep. Having more than six hours of sleep is known to help you think clearly and aid in learning and memory consolidation. In some cases, it is impossible to get enough sleep with the 24/7 society we live in. As a result, researchers have shown that by merely believing you have slept more, you are likely to increase your performance on mental tasks.

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.

Memory formation can be described as the process through which neuronal activity produces long-term synaptic changes (Hebb, 1949), and involves both encoding and consolidation. Sleep consists of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, with the latter including slow wave sleep (SWS). Predominantly, sleep plays a role in the consolidation of new memories, but also benefits encoding via increases in concentration (Sarode, et al., 2013). The extent of these benefits depends on a number of factors including the duration and time of sleep after learning (Diekelmann, Wilhelm, & Born, 2009). SWS and REM sleep also influence memory formation, with

Frenda and colleagues examined the relationship between sleep deprivation and the formation of false memories, due to prior research showing that there is a relationship between sleep deprivation and other cognitive functions, such as reaction time, working memory capacity, learning, and executive function. To support the methods they used, the researchers discussed types of false memory studies, which used suggestive questioning and misinformation procedures. They also mentioned that although there have been studies on sleep deprivation and false memory, the results have not proven to be very consistent, and they do not carry over into real life situations.

The effects of partial sleep deprivation on cognitive performances (such as attention and reaction time) was examined in twelve handball goalkeepers. After becoming familiar with the tests, the subjects participated in three tests in a randomized order over three days with a 72 hour rest period in between each session. These three days were (i) a reference-night which subjects slept nine hours, (ii) a partial sleep deprivation at the beginning of the night (SDB) where subjects slept from 3:00 to 7:00 a.m., and (iii) a partial sleep deprivation at the end of the night (SDE) where subjects slept from 10:00 p.m. until 3:00 a.m. During each session subjects performed a reaction time test, a selective attention task, and a constant attention task. In order to ensure there was no learning effects during the reaction test, barrage test, and Stroop test, the form and color were changed between sessions. Results show that the biggest effect was towards reaction time, which increased significantly from the reference night to SDB (p < 0.001) and SDE (p < 0.001). Also the results showed that reaction time was significantly higher during SDE than during SDB. Selective attention and constant attention decreased significantly from the reference-night to SDB and to SDE. Likewise, selective attention was significantly lower during SDB when compared to SDE. These findings suggest that cognitive performance (reactive time, selective attention, and constant attention) of handball goalkeepers

Sleep is one of the key essentials for cognitive performance, yet it is accounted that most people do not receive a sufficient amount. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2016 that on average, 50-70 million Americans do not receive the proper amount of sleep per night. This concept is more commonly referred to as sleep deprivation. By definition, sleep deprivation is simply not getting enough or the lack of sleep. As the number of hours that a person is awake increase, their cognitive and attentional deficits become more evident. Prospective memory is remembering to do something that you previously planned to do. This form of memory is often aided by cues in the environment and requires cognitive and attentional capacities. Sleep or the lack thereof can impact numerous processes such as memory, attention, and executive functioning. The main objective of this present study is to examine the effects of sleep deprivation on the attentional networks and cognitive functioning required for prospective memory. The results of this study will provide in depth insight on the importance of an adequate amount of sleep for the successful performance of various cognitive tasks and propose further research.

Sleep deprivation is detrimental to the performance of cognitive tasks (e.g., slowed down reaction time, decreased working memory, and decreased learning capacity). An article by popular science magazine Science Daily interprets an article published within Psychological Science that sleep deprivation is possibly linked to the creation of false memories. The original article was testing whether sleep deprivation had any part in causing false memories in humans. Two experiments were done to test the theory of sleep deprivation and false memories. The hypothesis of the experiment was “sleep deprivation increased false memories in a misinformation task when participants were sleep deprived during event encoding, but did not have a significant effect