Reduction of nocturnal slow-wave activity affects daytime vigilance lapses and memory encoding but not reaction time or implicit learning.
Slow Brain Oscillations of Sleep, Resting State and Vigilance. 2011-01-01; : 245-255
DOI: 10.1016/b978-0-444-53839-0.00016-8
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1. Prog Brain Res. 2011;193:245-55. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53839-0.00016-8.
Reduction of nocturnal slow-wave activity affects daytime vigilance lapses and
memory encoding but not reaction time or implicit learning.
Van Der Werf YD(1), Altena E, Vis JC, Koene T, Van Someren EJ.
Author information:
(1)Department of Sleep and Cognition, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, an
Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
Total sleep deprivation in healthy subjects has a profound effect on the
performance on tasks measuring sustained attention or vigilance. We here report
how a selective disruption of deep sleep only, that is, selective slow-wave
activity (SWA) reduction, affects the performance of healthy well-sleeping
subjects on several tasks: a “simple” and a “complex” vigilance task, a
declarative learning task, and an implicit learning task despite unchanged
duration of sleep. We used automated electroencephalogram (EEG) dependent
acoustic feedback aimed at selective interference with-and reduction of-SWA. In a
within-subject repeated measures crossover design, performance on the tasks was
assessed in 13 elderly adults without sleep complaints after either SWA-reduction
or after normal sleep. The number of vigilance lapses increased as a result of
SWA reduction, irrespective of the type of vigilance task. Recognition on the
declarative memory task was also affected by SWA reduction, associated with a
decreased activation of the right hippocampus on encoding (measured with fMRI)
suggesting a weaker memory trace. SWA reduction, however, did not affect reaction
time on either of the vigilance tasks or implicit memory task performance. These
findings suggest a specific role of slow oscillations in the subsequent daytime
ability to maintain sustained attention and to encode novel declarative
information but not to maintain response speed or to build implicit memories. Of
particular interest is that selective SWA reduction can mimic some of the effects
of total sleep deprivation, while not affecting sleep duration.
Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53839-0.00016-8
PMID: 21854967 [Indexed for MEDLINE]