Megan Wadon, a third-year PhD student from the NaPS lab, recently presented her research at Sleep Europe 2024, the 27th European Sleep Research Society's (ESRS) congress, held in Seville, Spain in September 2024.
The ESRS congress, brings together global leaders in sleep medicine and sleep science every two years. This year's conference spanned four days and welcome more in person attendees that ever before, as well as being live-streamed to virtual attendees that were unable to make it in person.
Megan successfully obtained the Guarantors of Brain Travel grant, enabling her to attend and present at the ESRS congress. Megan presented a poster on the impact of sleep engineering on a transitive inference task and also delivered a talk expanding on her research.
Transitive inferential thinking allows individuals to deduce relationships between items indirectly. For example, if a cat defeats a dog and the dog defeats a rabbit, one can infer that the cat will also defeat the rabbit. Megan's study examines how the length of these sequences impacts this process and explores how sleep engineering can enhance this. Her work also looks at the effect on activity in areas of the brain involved in this type of thinking and memory representation.
This study uses a process called Closed Loop Targeted Memory Reactivation (CL-TMR) to investigate this. TMR is when a sound is paired with a learned item and replayed again during sleep to reactivate the memory trace. The closed loop element of this process takes TMR further by precisely timing the sounds to specific sleep brain activity called Slow Oscillations, with the sound targeted to play at the peak of the Slow Oscillation.
The study shows that CL-TMR can improve inference performance for up to 2 weeks and highlights the involvement of an area of the brain called the precuneus in inferential thinking and memory representation. Check out Megan's poster for more information on this study.
Written by Megan Wadon & Sophie Smith
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