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How Sleep Affects Memory

CSEF · 2023 Cognitive Science First Award

Lu Alexandra, Ramchandran Arav · 8

Overview

Sleep is critical for memory, especially your declarative memory, which is used for storing facts and information. During sleep, your brain consolidates the information you learned throughout the day and prepares it for later recall. The purpose of our project is to discover whether studying at night, before consolidation, helps us retain more information than studying at other times of day. We can use this information to optimize the memorization process in our daily lives. We hypothesized that studying before sleeping rather than studying in the morning should help participants retain more information. We recruited 55 participants and asked them to memorize information about made-up characters. We assigned the participants to one of 3 groups. After each group took a pre-test on the characters, the AM group studied before 10:30am, the PM group studied after 7pm, and the NS group did not study at all. Participants could participate in 1-2 iterations of the experiment, and were instructed to sleep for 6+ hours/night during the experiment. After the experiment, we calculated the mean and other data points from our pre and post tests, and compared results between groups. In both weeks, AM and PM groups appeared to improve their scores in the post-test relative to the pre-test. We ran a statistical test that analyzes the variance between groups (ANOVA) along with more tests that pinpoint the differences between groups (t-tests). Although the mean post-test score in the PM group was higher, the tests showed that there was actually no significant statistical difference between the AM and PM groups. From this experiment, we confirmed that studying helps you memorize new information, assuming that you get a sufficient amount of sleep, but it is likely that the time of day when studying does not affect how much information you retain.

Source coverage

This record comes from a published award list, not a complete project archive. Its abstract comes from CSEF's public project showcase as archived by the Internet Archive before judging (https://web.archive.org/web/20230401224130/https://ca-csef.zfairs.com/showcase/ShowcaseInfo?f=838e60b7-ea75-46e8-865c-fde4864244b3); the version presented may differ.

Awards (1)

Competition history

  • CSEF 2023 Cognitive Science · Entry J0701

Resources

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