Abstract
Sleep deprivation increases rates of forgetting in episodic memory. Yet, whether an extended lack of sleep alters the qualitative nature of forgetting is unknown. We compared forgetting of episodic memories across intervals of overnight sleep, daytime wakefulness, and overnight sleep deprivation. Item-level forgetting was amplified across daytime wakefulness and overnight sleep deprivation, as compared to sleep. Importantly, however, overnight sleep deprivation led to a further deficit in associative memory that was not observed after daytime wakefulness. These findings suggest that sleep deprivation induces fragmentation among item memories and their associations, altering the qualitative nature of episodic forgetting.
Highlights
Why are some memories remembered and others forgotten? Retroactive interference accounts of forgetting argue that learning and mental activity that occurs after encoding contributes to memory loss (Wixted 2004)
On account of the interference posed by waking activities occurring both before and after the critical learning episode, sleep deprivation might open the door to fragmented forms of memory loss and, alter the qualitative nature of forgetting
Because previous work has suggested that negative affect can circumvent the impacts of sleep loss on itemlevel forgetting (Sterpenich et al 2007; Vargas et al 2019), we investigated whether the effects of sleep deprivation on associative memory were modulated by emotion
Summary
They were able to indicate uncertainty epochs and scored as wake, N1, N2, N3, or REM sleep in accordance by pressing “?” This ensured that participants were reasonably with standardized criteria For “new” or “uncertain” responses to adjec- (Delay: Sleep/Wake) × 2 (Image Emotion: Negative/Neutral) tives, participants moved immediately to the trial. In contrast to routine daytime wakefulness (Experiment 1), overnight sleep deprivation appeared to induce fragmentation among item memories and Turning to Experiment 2, we examined whether over- their associations. A trend for the Delay*Experiment interaction suggested that the effects of wakefulness (vs sleep) on item forgetting were amplified in Experiment 2 (overnight sleep deprivation) relative to Experinificant [F(1,53) = 6.59, P = 0.01, h2P = 0.11], whereas general rates of fragmentation were comparable between experiments [F(1,53) =.
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