While the functions of sleep remain largely unknown, one of the most exciting and contentious hypotheses is that sleep contributes importantly to memory. A large number of studies offer a substantive body of evidence supporting this role of sleep in what is becoming known as sleep-dependent memory processing. This review will provide evidence of sleep-dependent memory consolidation and sleep-de...

Digital acquisition and analysis of sleep data has become more common over the past 20 years. Many investigators have developed strategies to record and analyze sleep in a quantitative way. Initially, digital recording and analysis were restricted by technical limitations. With current technology, the technical limitations of computer acquisition, data storage, and analysis are less constrainin...

It would be nice if we could talk about sleep and memory as if there were only one type of memory and one type of sleep. But this is far from the case. Sleep and memory each comes in many forms, and furthermore, memories can go through multiple forms of post-encoding processing that must be individually addressed. Finally, sleep stages per se do not affect memories. Rather, the neuromodulatory ...

Visual structures in the environment are segmented into image regions and those combined to a representation of surfaces and prototypical objects. Such a perceptual organization is performed by complex neural mechanisms in the visual cortex of primates. Multiple mutually connected areas in the ventral cortical pathway receive visual input and extract local form features that are subsequently gr...

In this paper, we present a comparison of three audio taxonomy methods for MPEG-7 sound classification. The MPEG-7 sound classification and indexing tools consist of both low-level and high-level description schemes. For the low-level descriptors that we use, low-dimensional features based on spectral basis descriptors are produced in three stages: normalized audio spectrum envelope, principal ...

These studies examine the relationship between the analytic basis underlying the hierarchies produced by the Model of Hierarchical Complexity and the probabilistic Rasch scales that places both participants and problems along a single hierarchically ordered dimension. A Rasch analysis was performed on data from the balance-beam task series. This yielded scaled stage of performance for each of t...

Chronic pruritus is a debilitating condition with numerous etiologies. Many patients suffer from nocturnal pruritus, which can decrease quality of life and affect mortality in hemodialysis patients. Nocturnal pruritus may occur in all sleep stages but is most prevalent in stages N1 and N2. Further research is needed to elucidate the pathophysiology of nocturnal itch, which will aid in the devel...

A system for computer-assisted encoding, tabulation and analysis of visually scored sleep data is presented. The main features of the system are: (1) The use of computer-readable optical scan sheets for direct encoding of the sleep data. This eliminates the need for a separate transcription and/or key-punching operation. (2) The development of a visually scored data base, organized by NREM and ...