Sleep-dependent Learning in Aging

Sleep Clinical Trial

Official title: What is Sleep's Role in Alzheimer's Disease? Insight From Healthy Aging

Status Recruiting

Clinical Trial Summary

The specific objective of this proposed research is to understand whether deficits in sleep-dependent memory changes reflect age-related changes in sleep, memory, or both. The central hypothesis is that changes in both memory and sleep contribute to age-related changes in sleep-dependent memory processing. To this end, the investigators will investigate changes in learning following intervals of sleep (overnight and nap) and wake in young and older adults.

Clinical Trial Description

Exp 1: Using neuroimaging, the investigators will consider whether differences in brain areas engaged during memory encoding contribute to age-related changes in sleep-dependent memory consolidation for a word-pair learning task.

Exp 2: The investigators will examine the rate of memory decay between encoding and sleep using two probes of declarative memory (word-pair learning and visuo-spatial learning).

Exp 3: The investigators will provide additional opportunity for encoding of the word-pair and visuo-spatial learning tasks.

Exp 4: Using neuroimaging, the investigators will examine neural engagement during encoding and performance following intervals of sleep and wake.

Exp 5: The investigators will examine the rate of decay of motor sequence learning.

Exp 6: The investigators will examine whether enhanced training ('overtraining') improves sleep-dependent memory consolidation for older adults. ;

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Sleep

• NCT number: NCT03840083
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: July 15, 2018
• Completion date: July 15, 2024