CURF Spring 2021 Research Fair

The Effects of Sleep on Category Structure Knowledge

What is the role of sleep in preserving our memories of recently learned categories? Sleep is believed to facilitate memory consolidation, or the gradual process of changes in memory storage after initial encoding that are vital to preserving the memory. Research suggests that sleep is vital for abstraction and creative thinking, though time delays are also hypothesized to facilitate this process of generalization. How does one night of sleep impact our memory beyond what we would expect within the same timespan? Using a two-session design, this thesis addresses the effect of one night of sleep versus the same amount of time (12 hours) awake on memory performance on a feature association task. Spatial working memory, the ability to recognize patterns in visual cues, is an important aspect of cognition that occurs in the seconds after exposure to the stimulus. We recruited 80 workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to complete two sessions of a statistical learning task involving features of a new species of beetle. Counter to my hypothesis, sleep was not a statistically significant factor in overall accuracy scores for session two on either of the two category structures tested (ring structure with low modularity, and more clustered mod structure with high modularity). However, explicit accuracy scores for testing knowledge of core features to a given category structure showed trends consistent with my hypothesis. The mean explicit accuracy was higher for sleep sessions versus no sleep sessions, and the mean explicit accuracy was higher for subjects who learned the higher modularity structure.

PRESENTED BY
College Alumni Society Undergraduate Research Grant
College of Arts & Sciences 2021
Advised By
Dr. Anna Schapiro
Professor of Psychology
Join Jayme for a virtual discussion
PRESENTED BY
College Alumni Society Undergraduate Research Grant
College of Arts & Sciences 2021
Advised By
Dr. Anna Schapiro
Professor of Psychology

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