Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University Clayton, Clayton, Australia.
Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego, San Diego.
Sleep. 2018 Mar 1;41(3). doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsx213.
Working memory (WM) has been described as a multicomponent process, comprised of the following: attention-driven encoding, maintenance and rehearsal of information, and encoding to and retrieval from episodic memory. Impairments can affect higher-order cognitive processes and many everyday functions. The impact of sleep changes on these cognitive processes across the life span needs to be investigated. The aim of the current study is to examine the effects of sleep deprivation on component processes of WM, comparing younger and older adults across verbal and visuospatial modalities.
Thirty-one younger adults (19-38 years) and 33 older adults (59-82 years) attended two counterbalanced sleep protocols: a regular night of sleep followed by testing the next day (normally rested condition), and 36 hr of total sleep deprivation (TSD), followed by testing (TSD condition). Participants completed matched versions of verbal and visuospatial WM tasks across conditions.
Younger adults significantly outperformed older adults on encoding and displacement component processes, for both verbal and visuospatial WM. Following TSD, younger adults showed a significantly larger drop compared with older adults in verbal encoding and in visuospatial displacement. A main effect of condition was observed for verbal displacement.
Differences were observed in the performance of younger and older adults on component processes of WM following TSD. This suggests that TSD can have differential effects on each component process when younger and older adults are compared, in both verbal and visuospatial tasks. Understanding this profile of changes is important for the development of possible compensatory strategies or interventions and the differentiation of clinical and healthy populations.
工作记忆（WM）被描述为一个多成分的过程，包括以下几个方面：注意力驱动的信息编码、保持和复述，以及从情景记忆中进行编码和检索。损伤会影响高阶认知过程和许多日常功能。需要研究睡眠变化对整个生命周期中这些认知过程的影响。本研究的目的是检查睡眠剥夺对 WM 成分过程的影响，比较年轻和老年成年人在言语和视空间模态上的差异。
31 名年轻成年人（19-38 岁）和 33 名老年成年人（59-82 岁）参加了两个平衡的睡眠方案：正常睡眠一晚后第二天进行测试（正常休息条件），以及 36 小时的总睡眠剥夺（TSD）后进行测试（TSD 条件）。参与者在不同条件下完成了言语和视空间 WM 任务的匹配版本。
年轻成年人在言语和视空间 WM 的编码和位移成分过程中明显优于老年成年人。在 TSD 之后，年轻成年人在言语编码和视空间位移方面的下降幅度明显大于老年成年人。条件的主效应在言语位移中观察到。
在 TSD 后，年轻和老年成年人在 WM 的成分过程中的表现存在差异。这表明，当比较年轻和老年成年人时，TSD 可能对每个成分过程产生不同的影响，无论是在言语任务还是视空间任务中。了解这种变化的特征对于制定可能的补偿策略或干预措施以及区分临床和健康人群非常重要。
