Title : The effects of sleep deprivation on memory recollection through visual and written representation
Abstract:
Teenagers today are sleeping less than past generations, largely due to the ongoing digital revolution as Seton and Fitzgerald discuss, “Technology is largely to blame for keeping people perpetually connected in the digital world which is in turn driven by changing social demands for immediacy as a form of intimacy.”(Seton & Fitzgerald, 2021) In this era of connectivity, sleep is often seen as a waste of time. However, the lack of sleep can lead to mood changes and reduced academic performances.
The idea of sleep deprivation and its negative effects on performance and the brain has been widely investigated in episodic memory, as Newbury explains, “sleep deprivation before learning may be detrimental specifically for the encoding of hippocampal-dependent declarative memories,” (Newbury, 2021).
In the current study, we investigate the effects of sleep deprivation on memory for written contents such as stories, articles, journals and memory for visual representations of content, such as films, movies. In our effort to contrast memory for the two different modalities, we look at the brain as well as the behavioural performance of memory. Specifically, reading written texts utilize several cognitive areas in the brain, such as left fusiform gyrus and occipital lobe (Buchweitz, A., et al., 2009). Similarly, processing of visual content activates several brain regions, but the primary ones to note are the prefrontal cortex and inferotemporal cortex (Mandel, A., et al., 2014).
Successful retrieval of memory requires reactivation of brain regions initially involved in the processing of information (Rasch & Born, 2007). We study how sleep deprivation impacts this reactivation of the written vs. visual content processing regions.
