Stereotypes: How The Consequences Of Sleep

To the average adult, seven hours of sleep is enough to rest the mind and the body, however throughout the day many people choose to take naps. Sleep enhances subject’s memory of specific activities that occurred throughout the day. Lau (2011) conducted a study where the importance of taking a nap was assessed. He hypothesized that the participants who napped performed better than those who did not. I agree with Lau’s hypothesis because without sleep, the mind is distracted from daily learning by only thinking of going to sleep. Also, if the mind can only concentrate for forty-five minutes at a time, how can people expect for it to function after not having enough sleep? In his study, Lau was measuring the performance of relational memory. Memory consolidation is achieved through the rapid eye movement stage …show more content…
The amount of time spent in each of these stages correlates with learning and memory performance. The experiment conducted by Lau (2011) consisted of undergraduate participants who had to learn the meanings of twenty-one Chinese characters. These characters were organized into seven different groups. In each of these groups, three of the characters were paired with a radical; the radical meant the characters were related in meaning. The participants were given thirty minutes to learn the meanings and then were either allowed to take a nap or not. If the participant was allowed to take a nap they could either go to sleep immediately or had a short delay before sleeping. They delay was necessary to test how soon someone needed to go to sleep in order to improve relational memory. Participants who had a delay or stayed awake were not told that they could not rehearse the information they had just learned. Instead, they had to watch marine