058 The interactions of Sleep, Heart Rate Variability and Aging on an Emotional Directed Forgetting Memory Task

Introduction The ability to forget information plays an important role in our daily lives. Sleep plays a role in memory formation and as we age, sleep-quality and memory decrease. For emotional memory a drop in preference for negative stimuli is presented with aging. Heart-rate variability (HRV), a...

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Published in:Sleep (New York, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2021-05, Vol.44 (Supplement_2), p.A24-A25
Main Authors: Sattari, Negin, Upadhya, Anisha, Vinces, Karla, Mednick, Sara
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Introduction The ability to forget information plays an important role in our daily lives. Sleep plays a role in memory formation and as we age, sleep-quality and memory decrease. For emotional memory a drop in preference for negative stimuli is presented with aging. Heart-rate variability (HRV), a measurement of cardiac autonomic-activity, has been related to cognitive processes. It is unknown how HRV impacts sleep-dependent memory updates in older adults. Here, we investigated HRV and sleep-related emotional memory updates in the context of aging using a Directed-Forgetting (DF) paradigm. Methods We tested younger [N=105,18-25yr] and older adults [N=119,60-85yr]. Subjects encoded a DF Word-Paired task, in which either negatively/neutrally-valenced word-pairs were cued to-be-remembered (Retain) or forgotten (Alter) for a later test. They then took a polysomnographically-recorded (PSG) nap including HRV. Next, recognition was tested. Memory for both Retain and Alter words was measured. We compared memory, sleep-quality measured by Sleep-Efficiency (SE) and HRV, measured by normalized High-Frequency (HFnu), an indicator of parasympathetic activity. Bivariate correlations were used to measure the associations. Results Younger adults showed greater performance on both Retain and Alter word-pairs (p
ISSN:0161-8105
1550-9109
DOI:10.1093/sleep/zsab072.057