The influence of sleep on the accuracy of memory

The influence of sleep on the accuracy of memory

The purpose of this study is to do a memory-for-words that will explore the influence of sleep on the accuracy of memory. The study examines the influence of sleep on false memory. This study is looking at two things: (1) how does sleep improve recognition of words? And if so, it would support the claim that sleep facilitates encoding into LTM. (2) How does sleep enhance a false memory of a word?

According to Elizabeth F. Loftus (1996) false memories are often created by combining actual memories with suggestions received from others, it can include words that we learn and having them associated with semantic information. False memories are cause when we fail to recall the correct information. When we store information rarely we retrieve it exactly the way it happened, the fail to recall the information correctly may lead to false memories.

Sleep in false memory are measured by recalling words that categorized as studied before, critical words which are the unstudied words, and the critical words which are the one that were nit studied before, but because of the semantic association it may appear during recall process. Stadler, Roediger, & McDermott (1999).

A DMR paradigm is the tendency to falsely recall a target word from a list of words concentrated around that word. It lures people to falsely recall items that were never presented Roediger & McDermott (1995). In DRM paradigm, lists of words are constructed so that each word given is associated with a single non- presented word, referring to it as a critical lure. For instance, in this experiment to test participants’ words such as letters, school, study, reading, pen, pencil, paper, and pages, were presented, but its relat...

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...he items in the evening and in the following morning 12 hours later after their normal sleeping time, their memory for the items were tested. The non-sleep group studied and practiced the items in the morning 12 hours later after their day of activity their memory was tested. From the results was found that there was no significance difference between the two groups in recalling the words.

Limitations in this study that it uses a recognition technic instead of a free recall, low sample size, did not look at gender, as well as ethnicity (language in this case mater, especially when it comes to words that are not so familiar it is hard to recall them).

In future studies a bigger sample size would be relevant for a better outcome of the result, do the test in a native language would help participant for a better recall, look at the difference in gender, ethnicity.