The Impact of Insufficient Sleep on the Serial Reproduction of Information

Story telling is part of life, and the retelling of stories is an important form of communication, cultural practice, and message transmission. Insufficient sleep is known to affect relevant cognitive skill areas necessary for story retelling or transmission fidelity. We conducted a preregistered study on n=118 young adults who were administered a week each of restricted and well-rested sleep levels in their home environment (37 additional control participants were well-rested both treatment weeks). A serial story reproduction task was administered online, and the content of story retells was examined regarding the preservation of characters, details, and the key story event. Chains of up to 3 retells of a given story were examined, which involved varied numbers of sleep restricted (SR) versus well-rested (WR) retellers. While all retells of a story showed an average decay in content, results show that additional SR retellers in a chain was associated with greater decay, which mostly resulted from the introduction of an initial SR reteller at the beginning of the chain. Supporting the group-level effect, individual-level analysis confirmed that both the number of details and the story's key event were significantly less preserved after the SR compared to WR treatment week. Exploratory analysis showed an attenuation of this effect in those who reported a higher level of affective response (interest or surprise) in the story. This suggests that emotional engagement is important in combatting the deleterious effects of SR on successful story retelling, and perhaps on other types of content recollection.