14 DAY TRIAL // For years, scientists have been urging people to sleep or snooze at will, saying that this helps improve memory. However, a new study shows that the positive correlation does not hold true for seniors.
The exact reason why this happens has not yet been clearly established, but scientists behind the new work say that they could derive no statistically-significant correlation between sleep and memory improvements in senior citizens.
This is very unexpected discovery, since sleep has always been known to improve people's abilities to recall words, past moments, events and other memories. In addition, sleep also improves physical skills, helping to increase performances, even if people take just a nap.
Investigators at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA) now say that these positive effects may in fact extend exclusively to children, teens and adults, circumventing the elderly. Details of their work were presented during the annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience, on November 13.
The presentation was held by UMA experts Lauri Kurdziel and Rebecca Spencer, who were also the leaders of the research team. The explained that theirs was not the first study to propose this link.
Previous investigations established that people above the age of 50 are less capable of remembering a series of button presses than younger peers, even after taking a nap. However, the past studies were unable to explain whether the difference was caused by overall slower reactions times in seniors.
As such, the new research was dedicated to teasing out the exact causes behind this difference. In order to do that, the team analyzed two groups of people, one made up of participants aged 18 to 30, and the second one of 50-to-80-year-olds.
In the experiments the UMA team set up, all participants had to learn a succession of 10 colored doors. Each test subject went through two sessions, one at the beginning of the study, and a second one about 12 hours later, Science News reports.
The difference was that some took the second examination in the evening of the same day, whereas others took it the next morning. Members of both groups were put through these tests. For seniors, the night of sleep failed to improve performances.
One possible explanation for why this happens is that elderly people tend to spend less time each night in each individual sleep cycle. Particularly important for memory is sleep stage 2, where all the events of the day are replayed in the mind, and then stored to memory.
Additionally, seniors wake up more during the night, and tend to be more restless during sleep. However, these are only speculations, the team reports. New studies are needed to determine the exact processes underlying this connection.