The effects of sleep loss on short-term recognition memory.

Abstract

The performance of 20 sleep-deprived subjects on a probe-recognition memory task was compared with that of 20 non-deprived controls over periods up to 55 hours. Recognition was either immediate or delayed by 20 seconds. The results showed that the sleep-deprived group made significantly more errors in the perception of the material, and, under the delay condition, retained less adequately those items correctly perceived. It is argued that these findings are consistent with the notion that sleep loss causes a deficit in attention, leading to misperception and a failure to rehearse adequately material presented for memorization.ALTHOUGH SLEEP-LOSS is known to impair performance on a wide variety of tasks such as vigilance (Deaton, Tobias, & Wilkinson, 1971), speed of addition (Williams & Lubin, 1967), and reaction time (Wilkinson, 1963), there has been relatively little investigation into the effects of sleep-loss on memory. Those studies that have been carried out (e.g., Edwards, 1941) have tended to show that retention is indeed vulnerable to the stress of sleep loss. Recently investigators have been concerned with describing more specifically those aspects of the memory process primarily affected by sleep loss. Williams, Lubin, and Goodnow (1959) attributed the poor performance by sleep-deprived subjects on a task of immediate recall to inadequate sensory registration. Lapses, or brief periods of sleep, were evoked as the explanatory concept; during a lapse the sleep-deprived subject failed to register the information presented, and hence was unable to recall it. The sufficiency of this conclusion was challenged in a subsequent study by Williams, Gieseking, and Lubin (1966). Their approach assured sensory registration, but the authors still found a significant decrement in measures of immediate recall for the sleep-deprived subjects. As storage and retrieval processes were found to be relatively intact, the authors concluded that formation of the memory trace after registration was inadequate. McLeod (1968), using measures of acquisition and rate of decay derived from a theory elaborated by Wickelgren and Norman

A dual-probe recognition memory task for use during sustained operations

“…), presented through a loudspeaker or headphones at the rate of one stimulus every 2.5 sec. This task is similar to the task developed by Elkin and Murray (1974). The number triplets were extracted from a table of random numbers.…”

“…In the work of both Polzella (1974) and Elkin and Murray (1974), performance trials lasted 30 to 60 min. We felt that a more practical task for sustained operations should be shorter without compromising the overall utility and sensitivity of the single-probe paradigm.…”

“…Response latency was defined as the time between the onset of the tone signaling the probe, and the time at which the subject pressed a decision lever; Polzella (1974) incorporated this measure, but Elkin and Murray (1974) did not. Subjects' RTs were measured in the dual-probe task by having the experimenter manually start an electronic timing device that accumulated time in milliseconds until the subject closed a circuit by pressing a decision lever.…”

“…The most extensive investigations of information retention as a function of sleep deprivation have been carried out by Elkin and Murray (1974) and by Polzella (1974Polzella ( , 1975Polzella ( , 1978, using assessments of recognition memory. Working independently, these investigators developed different types of single-probe recognition memory tasks and studied the performance of humans, with and without sleep loss, on those tasks.…”

“…The pioneering works of Elkin and Murray (1974) and of Polzella (1974) served as the basis for our development of a dual-probe recognition memory task. This task combines certain key features of the tasks developed by these earlier investigators with a dual-probe procedure, to yield the maximum amount of data in a 20-min trial.…”