Individual Differences in Slow-Wave-Sleep Predict Acquisition of Full Cognitive Maps

Variations in cognitive maps: understanding individual differences in navigation.

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to assess except by self-report methods. VEs offer an opportunity to co...

Acquisition and Processing of Information During States of REM Sleep and Slow-Wave Sleep

Loss of slow-wave sleep.

A 40-year-old Hispanic American male, who weighed 165 lb and was 5’11” tall, consented to participate in a 3-day sleep protocol and was admitted to the UCLA General Clinical Research Center. The patient complained of fatigue during the day and difficulty initiating sleep, along with 3 to 4 awakenings per night. He denied snoring and having any difficulty breathing during sleep. A 2-week sleep d...

Acquisition of Cognitive Aspect Maps

Two experiments investigated the cognitive consequences of acquiring different aspects of a novel visual scene. Subjects were presented with map-like configurations, in which subsets of elements shared perceptual or action-related features. As observed previously, feature sharing facilitated judging the spatial relationship between elements, suggesting the integration of spatial and non-spatial...

Ghrelin promotes slow-wave sleep in humans.

Ghrelin, an endogenous ligand of the growth hormone (GH) secretagogue (GHS) receptor, stimulates GH release, appetite, and weight gain in humans and rodents. Synthetic GHSs modulate sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) and nocturnal hormone secretion. We studied the effect of 4 x 50 microg of ghrelin administered hourly as intravenous boluses between 2200 and 0100 on sleep EEG and the secretion of ...