Pre-learning sleep effects on directed forgetting

Abstract

While it has long been known that many areas of cognition are negatively affected by poor sleep or an absence of sleep, the effect of sleep problems on intentional forgetting has yet to be established. A directed forgetting (DF) paradigm, in which participants are tested on items they were asked to both remember and forget, was used to compare the remembering and forgetting of participants with poor sleep quality and the presence of insomnia symptoms to those with good sleep quality. This study implemented the use of a point system in which participants were told that they would receive various points to incentivize performance in place of remember and forget instructions in a DF task with the goal of computing DF costs and benefits. The relations among memory, sleep, working memory capacity, and other demographic factors were also examined. A DF effect was found when comparing the positive point value to the negative and neutral point values, costs were found for participants without the presence of insomnia symptoms, and working memory capacity was found to only be related to remembering in the DF task. These results suggest that the current DF manipulation is useful in examining benefits but not costs in DF, the presence of insomnia symptoms does not affect performance on a DF task, and that working memory capacity does not differ between those with and without the presence of insomnia symptoms.