Cognitive Processes Relating To SAD, Sleep To Facilitate Info Processing & Reoganisational Theory Of Dreaming

Question 1

What did Strickgold (2009) find?

Answer 1

Strickgold investigated benefit of sleeping on memory, he found that strong memories do not need sleep to be strengthened and really weak memories wont benefit from sleep, however a medium memory will be able to be pruned out or strengthened

Question 2

What did Mednick et al (2003) find?

Answer 2

He found that for a perception task, the same benefit was found after a 90 minute nap (containing all sleep stages) as from a full nights sleep

Question 3

What about Seehagen et al (2015)?

Answer 3

He found that when babies learn a new action, those who had a nap showed better recall of the skill than those who had not

Question 4

What does the reorganisational theory of dreaming suggest?

Answer 4

That the role of dreaming is to forget, Crick and Mitchison believe there are 2 types of memories, parasitic memories which are memories which have no benefit to us and adaptive memories which may help with our survival

In our sleep we decide which memories are adaptive and strengthen the link, and which are parasitic and get rid of them

Question 5

Evidence for reorganisational theory?

Answer 5

• Strickgold(2009)— medium memory trace gains the most benefit
• Neural networks—unlearning info when too full
• Mednick et al (2003)
• Seehagen et al (2015)

Question 6

Strengths of the reorganisational theory?

Answer 6

-Gives clear reason as to why we dream

Question 7

Weaknesses of reorganisational theory?

Answer 7

• Can’t explain how brain decides whats useful and whats not
• If brain stem stimuli are truly random then why do our dreams have a narrative?
• Not enough evidence on humans only computers, cant generalise