A systematic and meta-analytic review of the impact of sleep restriction on memory formation

Abstract

Modern life causes a quarter of adults and half of teenagers to sleep for less than is recommended (Kocevska et al., 2021). Given well-documented benefits of sleep on memory, we must understand the cognitive costs of short sleep. We analysed 125 sleep restriction effect sizes from 39 reports involving 1234 participants. Restricting sleep (3–6.5 hours) compared to normal sleep (7–11 hours) negatively affects memory formation with a small effect size (Hedges’ g = 0.29, 95 % CI = [0.13, 0.44]). We detected no evidence for publication bias. When sleep restriction effect sizes were compared with 185 sleep deprivation effect sizes (Newbury et al., 2021) no statistically significant difference was found, suggesting that missing some sleep has similar consequences for memory as not sleeping at all. When the analysis was restricted to post-encoding, rather than pre-encoding, sleep loss, sleep deprivation was associated with larger memory impairment than restriction. Our findings are best accounted for by the sequential hypothesis which emphasises complementary roles of slow-wave sleep and REM sleep for memory.