FUNCTIONAL IMAGING OF WORKING MEMORY

Functional Imaging of Working Memory

Functional Imaging of Working Memory

Rationale

A wide range of research associates sleep deprivation with a reduction in mental performance. The quantitative evaluation of this phenomenon is the subject of the research paper under review. The total of hours slept during a single 24 hour period is associated with decreased ability to exactly and effectively accomplish cognitive jobs and an increase in behaviour related issues for example, daytime drowsiness, agitation, and problems in learning and assimilation of new knowledge. Sleep loss is often the consequence of determinants in environment (Åkerstedt, 1990). The list include noisy sleeping environments or ambient temperature, constitutive causes (the most important of these are craniofacial irregularities), or health problems like seizures or allergies. The etiology of sleep deprivation and linked sleep issues is a complicated and fundamental interaction of the gene-brain-behaviour relationship having a wide spread significances for cognition, health and behaviour(Armenia, 2004).

Aims

It was proposed by the research team that working memory start losing efficiency as the period of sleep deprivation is extended. It was also proposed that the role of brain imaging in the research and investigation of the effects of sleep deprivation are to be compared by other methods (Callicott, 2003; Cogn, 2005)



Method

Profile of the volunteers

Initially 41 volunteers responded to the call. Out of these, 26 healthy adults were selected for the tests. 14 of these were men and the rest were women. The average age of the volunteers was between 19 to 25 years at the time of the test. The volunteers were selected after strict screening. They have to declare that they sleep an average of 7 hours in at night.

Various tasks including watching videos, conversation and reading were allowed to the participants. The effects of the retention of information gained from these activities were collected after three periods; a period of complete restfulness, a sleep deprivation of 24 hours and then a period of 36 hours(Chi, 2004).

Findings

The following are the findings of the research:

After a sleep deprivation of 24 hours, three tests were conducted. Maintenance and working of the working memory was tested for 14 participants(Drummond, 2000). The frontal activity was observed to increase with the increase in the task complexity. Partial activity however decreased. Testing for n-back working memory was conducted on 12 participants. Here the frontal activity dropped as the load of the tasked was increased. Another very interesting test conducted was serial addition/ subtractions. The frontal activity registered a drop. Similar was the case for partial activity. For a period of 48 hours, two tests were conducted. DMS (Delayed-match-to-sample) tasks with three different levels of load were tried on 18 participants. No change in frontal activity was registered. However, partial activity dropped. When verbal memory tasks were given to the participants after 48 hours of sleep deprivation, a marked decrease in the performance was observed. This is in line earlier research conducted in this field (Choo, 2005)

Various statistical techniques were used to quantitatively evaluate the ...