NCT03840083

Sleep-dependent Learning in Aging

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

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 584 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of Massachusetts, Amherst · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 80 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

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.

Detailed 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.

Conditions

• Sleep

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Sleep	Participants will sleep (either a mid-day nap or normal overnight sleep)

Timeline

• Start date: 2018-07-15
• Primary completion: 2025-07-14
• Completion: 2025-07-15
• First posted: 2019-02-15
• Last updated: 2025-04-03

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States