Publications by authors named "Kerstin Hoedlmoser"

Article Synopsis
  • Exposure to short-wavelength light, like that from smartphones, can suppress melatonin secretion before sleep, impacting sleep quality.
  • Limited studies have compared how this light affects sleep in adolescents versus young adults, revealing that while both groups experience melatonin disruption, adolescents recover faster.
  • Despite the melatonin impact, neither age group showed significant changes in sleep-dependent memory consolidation or overall sleep architecture, suggesting the importance of avoiding screens before bed to maintain healthy sleep patterns.
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Nonoscillatory measures of brain activity such as the spectral slope and Lempel-Ziv complexity are affected by many neurological disorders and modulated by sleep. A multitude of frequency ranges, particularly a broadband (encompassing the full spectrum) and a narrowband approach, have been used especially for estimating the spectral slope. However, the effects of choosing different frequency ranges have not yet been explored in detail.

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Progress in the field of insomnia since 2017 necessitated this update of the European Insomnia Guideline. Recommendations for the diagnostic procedure for insomnia and its comorbidities are: clinical interview (encompassing sleep and medical history); the use of sleep questionnaires and diaries (and physical examination and additional measures where indicated) (A). Actigraphy is not recommended for the routine evaluation of insomnia (C), but may be useful for differential-diagnostic purposes (A).

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The synchronization of canonical fast sleep spindle activity (12.5-16 Hz, adult-like) precisely during the slow oscillation (0.5-1 Hz) up peak is considered an essential feature of adult non-rapid eye movement sleep.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores how sleep affects motor adaptation, particularly in skills like typing, by examining brain activity during a new typing task on a mirrored keyboard.
  • Results indicate that participants showed better performance after a full night of sleep compared to staying awake, along with changes in brain activity, specifically reduced beta power and lower spectral slopes during the task.
  • Additionally, higher fast sleep spindle density after training was linked to improved motor adaptation, suggesting that sleep enhances the brain's ability to adapt to new motor tasks.
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Due to the high demands of competitive sports, the sleep architecture of adolescent athletes may be influenced by their regular training. To date, there is no clear evidence on how training characteristics (intensity, time of day, number of sessions) influence sleep quality and quantity. 53 male soccer players ( = 14.

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The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns worldwide forced children and adolescents to change and adapt their lives to an unprecedented situation. Using an online survey, we investigated whether they showed changes in sleep quality and other related factors due to this event. Between February 21st, 2021 and April 19th, 2021, a total of 2,290 Austrian children and adolescents (6-18 years) reported their sleep habits and quality of sleep as well as physical activity, daylight exposure and usage of media devices during and, retrospectively, before the pandemic.

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Increasingly studied in a systematic manner since the 1970s, the cognitive processes of the brain taking place during sleeping periods remain an important object of scrutiny in the scientific community. In particular, sleep has been demonstrated to play a significant role for learning and memory consolidation processes, and sleep scientists have started unravelling its underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. However, sleep remains a multidimensional phenomenon, and many questions remain left open for future research.

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Previously, we demonstrated that precise temporal coordination between slow oscillations (SOs) and sleep spindles indexes declarative memory network development (Hahn et al., 2020). However, it is unclear whether these findings in the declarative memory domain also apply in the motor memory domain.

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Previously, we presented our preliminary results (N = 14) investigating the effects of short-wavelength light from a smartphone during the evening on sleep and circadian rhythms (Höhn et al., 2021). Here, we now demonstrate our full sample (N = 33 men), where polysomnography and body temperature were recorded during three experimental nights and subjects read for 90 min on a smartphone with or without a filter or from a book.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Smartphone usage before bed has increased significantly, and exposure to blue light may disrupt sleep-related hormones and alertness levels, raising concerns about its impact on sleep quality.
  • - A study with 14 young male participants assessed the effects of reading on a smartphone with and without a blue light filter and on printed material before bedtime.
  • - Findings revealed that reading on a smartphone without a filter heightened morning cortisol levels and decreased sleep quality, while using a blue light filter offered some protection against these negative effects.
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Sleep spindles benefit declarative memory consolidation and are considered to be a biological marker for general cognitive abilities. However, the impact of sexual hormones and hormonal oral contraceptives (OCs) on these relationships are less clear. Thus, we here investigated the influence of endogenous progesterone levels of naturally cycling women and women using OCs on nocturnal sleep and overnight memory consolidation.

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Neuroimaging studies of childhood onset schizophrenia (COS), a rare yet severe form of schizophrenia with an onset before the age of 13 years, have shown continuity with adult onset schizophrenia. Previous research in adult patients has shown reduced sleep spindle activity, transient oscillations in the sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) generated through thalamocortical loops. The current study examines sleep spindle activity in patients with COS.

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Precise temporal coordination of slow oscillations (SO) and sleep spindles is a fundamental mechanism of sleep-dependent memory consolidation. SO and spindle morphology changes considerably throughout development. Critically, it remains unknown how the precise temporal coordination of these two sleep oscillations develops during brain maturation and whether their synchronization indexes the development of memory networks.

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Altered sleep neurophysiology has consistently been reported in adult patients with schizophrenia. Converging evidence suggests that childhood onset schizophrenia (COS), a rare but severe form of schizophrenia, is continuous with adult onset schizophrenia. The aim of the current study was to characterize sleep neurophysiology in COS.

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Neurofeedback has begun to attract the attention and scrutiny of the scientific and medical mainstream. Here, neurofeedback researchers present a consensus-derived checklist that aims to improve the reporting and experimental design standards in the field.

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Sleep has been shown to facilitate the consolidation of newly acquired motor memories. However, the role of sleep in gross motor learning, especially in motor adaptation, is less clear. Thus, we investigated the effects of nocturnal sleep on the performance of a gross motor adaptation task, i.

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Sleep and memory studies often focus on overnight rather than long-term memory changes, traditionally associating overnight memory change (OMC) with sleep architecture and sleep patterns such as spindles. In addition, (para-)sympathetic innervation has been associated with OMC after a daytime nap using heart rate variability (HRV). In this study we investigated overnight and long-term performance changes for procedural memory and evaluated associations with sleep architecture, spindle activity (SpA) and HRV measures (R-R interval [RRI], standard deviation of R-R intervals [SDNN], as well as spectral power for low [LF] and high frequencies [HF]).

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Sleep has been shown to facilitate the consolidation of newly acquired motor memories in adults. However, the role of sleep in motor memory consolidation is less clear in children and adolescents, especially concerning real-life gross-motor skills. Therefore, we investigated the effects of sleep and wakefulness on a complex gross-motor adaptation task by using a bicycle with an inverse steering device.

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This study examined the influence of physical exercise on the relation between shooting accuracy and the phase of the cardiac cycle in which the shot is fired. Thirteen experienced biathletes (8 females, mean age 17 years) fired from the standing position at rest and right after a submaximal exercise on a bicycle ergometer. Shooting accuracy and the timing of each shot relative to the R-waves of the electrocardiogram (ECG) were recorded.

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Sleep spindles are related to sleep-dependent memory consolidation and general cognitive abilities. However, they undergo drastic maturational changes during adolescence. Here we used a longitudinal approach (across 7 years) to explore whether developmental changes in sleep spindle density can explain individual differences in sleep-dependent memory consolidation and general cognitive abilities.

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Article Synopsis
  • This study compared the effects of daytime naps and full-night sleep on declarative and procedural memory consolidation, following up on previous research.
  • Seventy-six participants were assigned to nap or wake groups and performed memory tasks before and after a 90-minute interval of sleep or wakefulness.
  • Results showed that naps helped preserve procedural memories better than wakefulness, while full-night sleep significantly improved overall memory performance, suggesting different impacts of daytime and nighttime sleep on memory consolidation.
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For the past two decades, it has generally been accepted that sleep benefits motor memory consolidation processes. This notion, however, has been challenged by recent studies and thus the sleep and motor memory story is equivocal. Currently, and in contrast to the declarative memory domain, a comprehensive overview and synthesis of the effects of post-learning sleep on the behavioral and neural correlates of motor memory consolidation is not available.

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