The Effects of Sleep on Memory Performance Shannon Hasler & Tracey Young

Introduction Our Hypothesis: –As the quantity of sleep increases, memory performance also increases. –Poor quality of sleep results in memory deficits. –Non-REM sleep produces beneficial memory functioning rather than REM sleep.

Introduction It has been documented that memory is superior after sleep than after a period of regular awake activity (Hockey, Davies, & Gray, 1972). Night sleep is seemingly superior to day sleep in terms of memory. Sleep during the early part of the night produces a higher rate of remembering than sleep during the latter part of the night. (Hockey et al.).

Introduction The brain waves studied during the earlier half of the night were slow and large, characteristic of non-REM sleep, while the waves of the latter half of the night/morning were the active, rapid waves closely resembling REM waves. Hockey et al. found that forgetting was reduced with the slow large waves were present, which appear during non-REM sleep.

Method Participants: 30 randomly selected Acadia University students. Materials: Two questionnaires were used –assessing subjects quality, quantity, and type of sleep. –assessing the subjects short-term and long-term memory performance. Procedure: A total score for each variable was obtained via adding up the responses for each variable and analyzed statistically via simple regression.

Results Quality was found to be significant for both short- term (Y’ x, 18.1% proportion variance) and long-term memory (Y’= x, 16.6% proportion variance). Quantity was found to be not significant for either short-term memory (Y’= x, 0% proportion variance) or for long-term memory (Y’= x, 12% proportion variance).

Results Type of sleep was found to be significant for short-term (Y’= x, 18.5% proportion variance) and but not significant for long-term (Y’= x, 4.3% proportion variance) memory performance.

Discussion The effect of sleep quality suggests that in order to enhance both types of memory, adequate sleep quality is required. Since quantity of sleep seems to have no effect on either type of memory, sleeping for a greater number of hours will not result in enhanced memory. For better short-term memory, non-REM sleep is necessary but has no effect on long-term memory.

Future Research We thought that maybe in the future one could do an experimental research by having subjects assessed during their sleep to study their wave patterns, to control the amount of sleep one intakes, and to determine the quality of their sleep. To study the subjects memory performance, researchers could require a task for both short- term and long-term mental functioning.

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