Spontaneous arousals from sleep in human subjects

Abstract

Signaled arousals (SA) and unsignaled arousals (UA) from sleep were studied in nine Ss over 5 nights. The SA rate was highest in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and lowest in Sleep Stage 4; SAs typically terminated REM periods. This pattern was not observed for unsignaled arousals. These results lend support to the theory (Snyder, 1966) that REM sleep serves a vigilance function. The results also call into question purely physiological criteria of arousal from sleep. © 1972, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.