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Wearing an eye mask during overnight sleep improves episodic learning and alertness Viviana Greco^ 1 , Damiana Bergamo^ 2 , Paola Cuoccio^ 3 , Karen R Konkoly^ 4 , Kike Munoz Lombardo^ 1 , Penelope A Lewis^ 1 Affiliations Expand Affiliations * ^1 Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK. * ^2 IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca, Italy. * ^3 Department of Psychology, University of Padua, Padova, Italy. * ^4 Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA. * PMID: 36521010 * PMCID: PMC9995773 * DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsac305 Free PMC article Item in Clipboard Wearing an eye mask during overnight sleep improves episodic learning and alertness Viviana Greco et al. Sleep. 2023. Free PMC article Show details Display options Display options Format [Abstract] Sleep Actions * Search in PubMed * Search in NLM Catalog * Add to Search . 2023 Mar 9;46(3):zsac305. doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsac305. Authors Viviana Greco^ 1 , Damiana Bergamo^ 2 , Paola Cuoccio^ 3 , Karen R Konkoly^ 4 , Kike Munoz Lombardo^ 1 , Penelope A Lewis^ 1 Affiliations * ^1 Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK. * ^2 IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca, Italy. * ^3 Department of Psychology, University of Padua, Padova, Italy. * ^4 Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA. * PMID: 36521010 * PMCID: PMC9995773 * DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsac305 Item in Clipboard Full text links Cite Display options Display options Format [Abstract] Abstract Ambient light can influence sleep structure and timing. We explored how wearing an eye mask to block light during overnight sleep impacts memory and alertness, changes that could benefit everyday tasks like studying or driving. In Experiment 1, ninety-four 18-35-year-olds wore an eye mask while they slept every night for a week and underwent a control condition in which light was not blocked for another week. Five habituation nights were followed by a cognitive battery on the sixth and seventh days. This revealed superior episodic encoding and an improvement on alertness when using the mask. In Experiment 2, thirty-five 18-35-year-olds used a wearable device to monitor sleep with and without the mask. This replicated the encoding benefit and showed that it was predicted by time spent in slow-wave sleep. Our findings suggest that wearing an eye mask during overnight sleep can improve episodic encoding and alertness the next day. Keywords: alertness; episodic memory; eye mask; learning; sleep. (c) Sleep Research Society 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Sleep Research Society. Figures Graphical Abstract Graphical Abstract Graphical Abstract Graphical Abstract Figure 1. Figure 1. Experimental procedure. (A) Experiment 1... Figure 1. Experimental procedure. (A) Experiment 1 consisted of 2 consecutive weeks in which, in... Figure 1. Experimental procedure. (A) Experiment 1 consisted of 2 consecutive weeks in which, in a counterbalanced order, ambient light was blocked with an eye mask during sleep for 1 week, or not blocked with a control mask for the other week. Night 1-Night 5: participants slept at home wearing a mask (eye mask or control). Day 6-Day 7: participants performed the PAL, the PVT, and the MSL task. (B) Experiment 2 consisted of 5 days, 2 habituation nights, and 2 experimental days. For the entire study duration, participants slept with an eye mask or a control mask (counterbalanced order) together with the DH. In the morning of Days 4 and 5, participants completed the PAL and the PVT. Figure 2. Figure 2. Behavioral results. Boxplots for (A)... Figure 2. Behavioral results. Boxplots for (A) learning performance on the PAL, (B) reaction times... Figure 2. Behavioral results. Boxplots for (A) learning performance on the PAL, (B) reaction times on PVT, and (C) number of correctly tapped sequences on the MSL task. Mean +/- standard errors of the mean are indicated. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. Figure 3. Figure 3. (A) Experiment 2. PAL results... Figure 3. (A) Experiment 2. PAL results ( N = 28). Boxplots for learning performance... Figure 3. (A) Experiment 2. PAL results (N = 28). Boxplots for learning performance on the PAL after a night of sleep wearing the eye mask or the control mask. (B) Combined results of the encoding performance on the PAL from Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 112). **p < .01; *p < .05. (C) Significant Spearman's (rank) correlation between the time spent in SWS (minutes) and the learning performance on the word pairs after a night wearing the eye mask. Note that when N = 3 outliers were removed, the correlation was still significant (r[s] = 0.44, p = .04). (D) Spearman's (rank) correlation between time spent in SWS (minutes) and learning performance on the word pairs after a night wearing the control mask. See this image and copyright information in PMC Similar articles * Acoustic enhancement of slow wave sleep on consecutive nights improves alertness and attention in chronically short sleepers. Diep C, Garcia-Molina G, Jasko J, Manousakis J, Ostrowski L, White D, Anderson C. Diep C, et al. Sleep Med. 2021 May;81:69-79. doi: 10.1016/j.sleep.2021.01.044. Epub 2021 Jan 30. Sleep Med. 2021. PMID: 33639484 Clinical Trial. * Sleep spindles and rapid eye movement sleep as predictors of next morning cognitive performance in healthy middle-aged and older participants. Lafortune M, Gagnon JF, Martin N, Latreille V, Dube J, Bouchard M, Bastien C, Carrier J. Lafortune M, et al. J Sleep Res. 2014 Apr;23(2):159-67. doi: 10.1111/jsr.12108. Epub 2013 Nov 18. J Sleep Res. 2014. 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