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Updated: Aug 23, 2026

Eye Tracking, Cortisol, and a Sleep vs. Wake Consolidation Delay: Combining Methods to Uncover an Interactive Effect of Sleep and Cortisol on Memory
Published on: June 18, 2014
Loss of negative priming following sleep deprivation
Yvonne Harrison1, Erik Espelid
1School of Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, UK. psyyharr@livjm.ac.uk
Abstract:
It has been argued that one night of sleep loss in young healthy adults produces changes similar to that associated with normal, healthy ageing--in particular, that young sleep-deprived adults perform similarly to 60-year-old sleep-satiated adults on some tasks of frontal lobe function. This proposition was examined using a protocol viewed by many to be a direct probe of nonvolitional attention mechanisms associated with frontal lobe function. A negative priming (NP) procedure was used to compare performance between non-sleep-deprived (NSD) and sleep-deprived (SD, 34 hr) young, healthy adults. This protocol allowed for exploration of two theories of the NP effect based on inhibitory or memorial processes. Under conditions believed to facilitate inhibitory processes a normal NP effect was found for NSD(16 ms) and SD (9 ms) participants. Under conditions believed to rely on memorial processes there was no NP effect following SD, compared with a normal NP effect for NSD participants (11 ms). Distractor interference was also greater following SD. These findings do not suggest a similar pattern of change following sleep loss in healthy young adults to that of normal, healthy, non-sleep-deprived aged groups.
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