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.
Highlights
Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to perform an action in the future [1].An optimal functioning of PM is essential in everyday life [2], for example, in a patient who is required to take a drug every day at specified intervals
PM task instructions and the beginning of the ongoing task, respectively [3]. It has been suggested [4,5] that two processes are involved in prospective remembering: (1) a top-down mechanism implicated in the strategic monitoring, i.e., maintaining the intention in memory while monitoring the environment in order to detect potential stimuli related to the intention; (2) a bottom-up mechanism involved in the spontaneous retrieval, which is spontaneously activated when an intention-related stimulus is detected
If sleep played a primary role in the modulation of PM, we expected to find an impaired PM performance at get-up time in each clinical group compared to healthy controls
Summary
An optimal functioning of PM is essential in everyday life [2], for example, in a patient who is required to take a drug every day at specified intervals This example refers to the so-called habitual PM [3], a PM subdomain alongside vigilance (e.g., preventing a kettle from boiling over, as suggested by [3]). PM task instructions and the beginning of the ongoing task, respectively [3] It has been suggested [4,5] that two processes are involved in prospective remembering (remembering to perform a delayed intention in the future): (1) a top-down mechanism implicated in the strategic monitoring, i.e., maintaining the intention in memory while monitoring the environment in order to detect potential stimuli related to the intention; (2) a bottom-up mechanism involved in the spontaneous retrieval, which is spontaneously activated when an intention-related stimulus is detected. This sharing of resources is considered to be primarily responsible for the interference effects underlying the prospective failure in everyday memory performance [6]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
