Sleep And Learning Lab: The Effects Of Sleep And Learning

Sleep and Learning Lab In this lab we studied the effects of sleep on learning. Using what we have learned in class, we know that the normal sleep period for adults is around an average of 7-8 hours a night. What we wanted to determine by the use of this lab was to show how changing the amount of sleep we get at night might affect our cognitive performance the next day. We can assume that having more or less sleep than the norm, definitely has an effect on our learning, specifically on our short term memory but what our study was designed to test was whether that is a positive or negative effect. We presume that having too little or too much can be detrimental to our learning capacity, specifically our memory retention rate. More specifically, we hypothesized that if we have a normal 8 hour sleep duration, then we will have better memory than if we were to sleep more or less than 8 hours. Although there are no definite conclusions on exactly how much sleep affects a person 's learning potential, we can assume that there is to be some effect, whether it be small or even possibly large. There are debating conclusions on how much sleep we actually need in a night to fully function at our greatest capacity the next day. Some studies show you need as much sleep as our bodies will naturally let us and yet others say we are

It is a periodic reversible loss of consciousness, in which varying levels of brain activity occur. Despite the multiple stages and cycles experienced in one night of sleep, the average recommended amount of sleep is seven to eight hours. During this lab, we tested the effects of sleep duration on memory. Conducting three trials of sleep, we were able to determine the validity of our hypothesis. Our research results failed to reject our hypothesis, which stated that getting eight hours of sleep would result in the best memory results compared to the other two