Research suggests that sleep deprivation both before and after encoding has a detrimental effect on memory for newly learned material. However, there is as yet no quantitative analyses of the size of these effects. We conducted two meta-analyses of studies published between 1970 and 2020 that investigated effects of total, acute sleep deprivation on memory (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurobiol Learn Mem
September 2020
Research suggests that sleep plays a vital role in memory. We tested the impact of total sleep deprivation on adults' memory for a newly learned writing system and on their ability to generalise this knowledge to read untrained novel words. We trained participants to read fictitious words printed in a novel artificial orthography, while depriving them of sleep the night after learning (Experiment 1) or the night before learning (Experiment 2).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is widely accepted that sleep aids in the encoding, consolidation, and retrieval processes involved in memory processing; however, the conditions under which sleep influences memory may be substantially constrained. In a meta-analysis, we examined the effects that sleep has on both veridical (accurate) and false memory consolidation, in studies using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm for memory of thematically related words. The meta-analysis revealed that, whereas there was no overall effect of sleep on either accurate or false memories, the effect of sleep on overall memories was moderated by two constraints.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVery little is known about people's ability to localize sound under varying workload conditions, though it would be expected that increasing workload should degrade performance. A set of eight auditory clinical alarms already known to have relatively high localizability (the ease with which their location is identified) when tested alone were tested in six conditions where workload was varied. Participants were required to indicate the location of a series of alarms emanating at random from one of eight speaker locations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSleep is known to affect learning and memory, but the extent to which it influences behavioural processing in the left and right hemispheres of the brain is as yet unknown. We tested two hypotheses about lateralised effects of sleep on recognition memory for words: whether sleep reactivated recent experiences of words promoting access to the long-term store in the left hemisphere (LH), and whether sleep enhanced spreading activation differentially in semantic networks in the hemispheres. In Experiment 1, participants viewed lists of semantically related words, then slept or stayed awake for 12h before being tested on seen, unseen but related, or unrelated words presented to the left or the right hemisphere.
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