Sleep and Prospective Memory: A Retrospective Study in Different Clinical Populations

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) is essential in everyday life because it concerns the ability to remember to perform an intended action in the future. This ability could be influenced by poor sleep quality, the role of which, however, is still being debated. To examine the role of sleep quality in PM in depth, we decided to perform a retrospective naturalistic study examining different clinical populations with a primary sleep disorder or comorbid low sleep quality. If sleep is important for PM function, we could expect poor sleep to affect PM performance tasks both directly and indirectly. We examined a total of 3600 nights, recorded using actigraphy in participants belonging to the following groups: primary insomnia (731 nights); narcolepsy type 1 (1069 nights); attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (152 nights in children and 239 in adults); severe obesity (232 nights); essential hypertension (226 nights); menopause (143 nights); healthy controls (808 nights). In a naturalistic activity-based PM task, each participant originally wore an actigraph around the non-dominant wrist and was requested to push the event-marker button at two specific times of day: bedtime (activity 1) and get-up time (activity 2). Each clinical group showed significantly lower sleep quality in comparison to the control group. However, only narcolepsy type 1 patients presented a significantly impaired PM performance at get-up time, remembering to push the event-marker button around half the time compared not only to healthy controls but also to the other clinical groups. Overall, the present results seem to point to sleep quality having no effect on the efficiency of a naturalistic activity-based PM task. Moreover, the data indicated that narcolepsy type 1 patients may show a disease-specific cognitive deficit of PM.

Sleep, Prospective Memory, and Immune Status among People Living with HIV

“…Our prospective memory paradigm can be considered as a routine everyday task which may be more relevant to clinical populations for which healthcare actions needs to be made regularly, e.g., in patients on cART, in whom deficits in neurocognitive functions are frequently reported [ 60 ]. Sleeping after encoding appears to influence and strengthen the memory to perform an intended action at a planned time, suggesting a beneficial effect of sleep on prospective memory [ 61 , 62 ], although this point is still being debated [ 40 , 63 ]. Reduced sleep quality and quantity are connected to altered and diminished encoding and memory consolidation abilities over time [ 23 , 64 ].…”

“…However, the fact that better scores for several sleep parameters (sleep efficiency and latency) were positively associated with this prospective memory task in healthy controls but not in PLWH suggests that sleep quality is not the main factor of memory performance [ 40 , 63 ]. Indeed, the deteriorated fragmentation index in PLWH was not correlated with any performance index of the task.…”

“…Prospective memory performance was assessed through a naturalistic, activity-based task [ 40 ]. Participants were originally requested to push the event-marker button on the top of the actigraph to signal bedtime (activity of going to bed, activity 1) and get-up time (activity of getting out of bed, activity 2).…”

Activity-Based Prospective Memory in Insomniacs

“…Several research studies have shown significant impairments in vigilance, memory and psychomotor control [30][31][32] but, on the contrary, other works have found no clear results of cognitive performance impairments in insomniac patients [33][34][35]. With some surprise, a positive relationship between insomnia and cognitive performance has been recently highlighted.…”

Mindfulness, Subjective Cognitive Functioning, Sleep Timing and Time Expansion during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Longitudinal Study in Italy

“…In addition to the relationship between memory and time perception, in recent years, it has been widely shown as a sleep effect on both types of memory, although the relationship between sleep and prospective memory is still under debate. Interestingly, a recent study [ 75 ] speculated that the lower accuracy in executing prospective memory at bedtime could be related to the higher pressure of the homeostatic sleep regulation process [ 76 ] and decreased alertness levels. Thus, it is possible to expect that people with altered sleep timing and regulation, as well as lower dispositional mindfulness, should be impaired in memory functioning during the home confinement.…”