Profile of: Jayden Roberts

Award received: NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship - Masters

Awarded for the project: Circadian rhythms and memory suppression: The influence of chronotype on intentional forgetting

Department: Psychology

Supervisor: Dr. Biljana Stevanovski

An estimated 60% of university students suffer from poor sleep. Sleep is related closely to academic success and mental health in young adults: sleep length and quality, especially wake-up times, predict grades and mental health in university samples.

While recent work has found that sleep deprivation affects cognition across a variety of tasks and measures, including inhibition and intentional forgetting, we don’t yet fully understand how sleep style affects these cognitive processes. Studies on intentional forgetting have allowed us to better understand how we can exert control over our memories and thus actively choose to forget information.

As forgetting can be adaptive, the ability to suppress memories may be fundamental to maintaining mental health, especially for psychological disorders including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder for which intrusive memories are a common feature.

To further explore the effects of sleep on cognition, my research project is investigating if intentional forgetting is influenced by whether participants are tested in their optimal or suboptimal arousal periods of the day.

The cognitive process of memory inhibition will be studied using the classical Think/No-Think paradigm, which has shown that purposely suppressing the retrieval of a memory can induce intentional forgetting. Participants will complete questionnaires to collect demographic information and assess sleep style information prior to performing the task.

Given that sleep deprivation can impair memory and that chronotype has been shown to affect performance during various cognitive tasks, we hypothesize that being tested during suboptimal arousal periods of the day will impair the ability to effectively intentionally forget.

This experiment will provide valuable insight into the cognitive processes that underlie intentional forgetting while increasing our comprehension of how differences in individual sleep styles may affect these abilities.

As a large proportion of young adults and university students struggle with sleep, my Research Apprenticeship I work will reveal the consequences of sleep styles on cognition and inhibition in a university-aged sample.