Sleep and prospective memory

A positive sleep effect has been recently observed on prospective memory. In this retrospective study (N = 254, 30.64 ± 13.79 years, 55.10% of females), we investigated the relationship between sleep and prospective memory, comparing the performance of “good” and “bad” sleepers in a naturalistic prospective memory task (to remember to press the event-marker button of actigraphy at wake-up time). The “good” and “bad” sleepers were defined according to following sleep parameters: Sleep Onset Latency(SOL), Total Sleep Time (TST), Wake After Sleep Onset (WASO), Sleep Efficiency (SE), and Number of Awakenings (NA > 5). The results showed that the good sleepers performed the prospective memory task better than the bad sleepers. Specifically, the performance of prospective memory task at wake-up time was influenced by the quantity (TST) and the quality (WASO, SE%, and NA > 5) of the sleep.