The Effects Of Sleep Deprivation On False Memory

The purpose of this study was to consider the effects that sleep deprivation had on false memories. They knew that sleep deprivation had negative effects on many bodily functions, but there were no other studies that considered the effects that it had on memory susceptibility. Therefore, they conducted two experiments to test their thoughts about the impacts that sleep deprivation may have on false memories in hopes of finding a relationship between the two. The general hypothesis tested in this study was that sleep deprivation had an effect on the likelihood of having false memories. In the first experiment, they wanted to see if the self-reported sleep duration of the night before the study was associated with false memories of a news event …show more content…
First, it would be difficult to keep a sleep diary like these participants were instructed to do because it is impossible to know when we actually fall asleep. Also, many times throughout the night we wake up and do not remember doing so which would make it hard to accurately record how much we slept that week. Second, the participants were told that they would be asked questions about the images and to focus on the narratives. Therefore they are already preparing themselves for questions that would involve their recollection of these images and narratives. This affects the accuracy of their responses because they would be paying more attention than someone would be during an everyday task. If I were to conduct this over again, I would not warn the participants that they were going to be asked questions about the images or narratives and I would not ask them to keep a sleep diary. I would tell them after they had looked at the images and narratives that they would be asked questions about them and I would also find a more precise way to measure the amount of sleep these people had the week before the …show more content…
In this study, only undergraduates were tested and I am curious to see if age plays a part in the effect of sleep deprivation on false memories. Younger people are more naturally vulnerable to false memories so it would be interesting to see if sleep deprivation would increase false memories more in one age group than another. Also, many older people grow accustomed to having less sleep per night so the 30-40 year olds may have less false memories when sleep deprived than undergraduate or middle school students based on their differing ages and experience of functioning on restricted sleep. Therefore, I would expect to see that age does have an effect on false memories after being sleep