Sleep Deprivation

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Past evidence suggests that sleep deprivation negatively affects solidification of memories. This experiment’s role was to confirm whether sleep deprivation does affect memory consolidation. Previous experiments also have shown, in human studies, that learning is improved only through a night of sleep and not through an equal amount of time wakefulness. (Walker, 2005; walker et al., 2003) It has also been noted in rodent studies that that sleep loss that after training does not produce a memory deficit four to six hours after training. (Bjorness et al., 2005; Graves et al., 2003; Smith et al., 1998; Smith & Rose, 1996) The experimenters’ final hypothesis is that sleep deprivation soon after the delay-conditioned task will cause the rats to …show more content…

During training and testing only one rat would be placed inside the testing chamber at a time. The first day the rats were allowed to explore the chamber for 1 hour. On day 2 the rats were placed in the testing chamber and where given an hour to again explore. Then an experimenter would present fruit juice (UC) randomly throughout the hour. On day 3 they were given an hour in the chamber. During this hour the rats were exposed to a house light conditioned stimulus (CS) that was fixed on the roof of the chamber above a window. The window would open and the rats would have to put their head through the window to obtain the juice and every head probe through the window was recorded. The rats would then be guided towards the window to show them the fruit juice. This training was repeated about 15-20 times. If the rats could not learn the first session, they would be trained again the next day. Out of 25 rats only 3 did not learn the first training session and had the process repeated the next day. Of the 3 rats that repeated training, one was placed into (SD) and the other 2 where placed into (NSD) through random assignment. On day 4 testing started at 10:30 a.m. for 1 hour. The rats where placed into the testing chamber and were given 5 minutes to explore. After 5 minutes the house light (CS) was …show more content…

NSD and SC rats had an increase in performance in testing (NSD rats: Tukey p < 0.001; SC rats: Tukey p < 0.001) (Figure 2) were as SD showed much worse results (Tukey p < 0.001) (Figure2). SD rats also should a decline in head pokes compared to the training (Tukey p < 0.001) (Figure2). All animals showed similar amount of head pokes during training period meaning they were all equally trained (Figure2).

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