Attention and memory changes

Abstract

Attention and memory are cognitive functions that critically depend on sleep. Loss of sleep results in an increase in the number of attentional lapses and in slower and more variable response times in tests of sustained attention. Tests of selective attention have revealed that sleep loss impairs the ability to accurately detect the relevant among irrelevant information. Sleep loss prior to learning new information impairs memory encoding, while loss or disruption of sleep following a learning session impairs the consolidation of new memories that are initially in a fragile state. Electroencephalographic slow waves, sleep spindles, and rapid eye movement sleep have all been implicated in memory consolidation, but a unifying view of the causal mechanisms in sleep is still missing.