The effect of sleep deprivation on memory and psychomotor function in healthy volunteers

Abstract

Benzodiazepines and other psychotropic drugs have been implicated in the production of memory deficits. The mechanism is unclear, but both a distinct pharmacological action and a non-specific sedative effect have been suggested as being causal or contributory. These two postulated mechanisms of action may be examined separately by using sleep deprivation as a method of non-pharmacological sedation. We measured psychomotor and memory functions in eight sleep-deprived healthy volunteers and eight controls. There was both subjective and objective evidence of sedation, but memory function was not affected. These findings support the view that the effect on memory of psychotropic drugs is principally caused by a direct amnestic effect rather than by drug-induced sedation. Copyright 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Vast amounts of encoded items nullify but do not reverse the effect of sleep on declarative memory

“…There are several limitations that were impossible to eliminate in this study and therefore possibly contribute to our results. (1) Variability in memory performance between subjects increases with list size and although the sample size was large in comparison to other studies (Ellenbogen, Hulbert et al, 2006;Igloi et al, 2015;Marshall et al, 2006;Ngo et al, 2013;Studte et al, 2017;Quigley et al, 2000) this probably decreased statistical power. To ameliorate this noise issue, criterion learning could be used in future studies, where learning is repeated until a certain percentage of word-pairs can be recalled correctly.…”

Neuropsychological Effects of Sleep Loss: Implication for Neuropsychologists

“…Findings regarding accuracy of performance on auditory, visual or spatial short-term memory tasks after sleep deprivation have been mixed. Impaired digit recall performance has been reported in one study (Frey et al, 2004), but not others (Glenville et al, 1978;Linde & Bergstrom, 1992;Quigley, Green, Morgan, Idzikowski, & King, 2000). Decrements in spatial memory performance were quantified as a loss of 5-10% (Williamson & Feyer, 2000), but these positive findings were not replicated by Ferri et al (2001) on a test of complex spatial attention.…”

Acute sleep deprivation disrupts emotion, cognition, inflammation, and cortisol in young healthy adults

“…While cognitive deficits have been well-documented as a consequence of sleep deprivation (Kahn et al, 2013;Short and Louca, 2015), the present results support the argument that there is a threshold of sleep loss that needs to be reached before higher order cognitive domains are affected (e.g., executive functioning). This also explains why executive functioning is typically impaired with chronic sleep loss but not always with acute sleep loss (Binks et al, 1999;Quigley et al, 2000;Sagaspe et al, 2003Sagaspe et al, , 2006Drummond et al, 2006;Tucker et al, 2010). Nevertheless, there are mixed findings on the effects of acute sleep deprivation on cognitive performance (Nilsson et al, 2005;Lim and Dinges, 2010;Killgore and Weber, 2014;Chua et al, 2017;Kusztor et al, 2019), and specific cognitive domains are still disputed.…”