0217 ACTIGRAPHY-DEFINED SLEEP IN RELATION TO LABORATORY MEASURES OF CREATIVITY AND EDUCATIONAL LEARNING

Abstract

Introduction: College students often sacrifice sleep in order to maximize study time. However, sleep deprivation is known to have negative effects on cognition, including reduced memory consolidation, impaired creativity, and inability to cope with stress. Therefore, we investigated whether undergraduate students' sleep quantity was associated with their performance on several laboratory measures of creativity and educational learning. Method(s): Forty-one undergraduate students completed both experimental sessions. During session 1, participants completed a virtual microeconomics course along with laboratory based measures of creativity (e.g., Remote Associates Test). Across the following week, participants maintained sleep diaries and wore wristband actigraphy to measure their sleep subjectively and objectively, respectively. During session 2, participants completed creativity measures and a microeconomics test that included problems they were originally trained to perform as well as problems that required integration of learned principles. Result(s): Participants who slept for 7 to 9 hours per day (normal sleepers) tended to score higher than participants with short or long sleep on the microeconomics test, both for trained problems (M=10.50 for normal sleepers, M=7.59 for long and short sleepers) and integration problems (M=1.33 for normal sleepers, M=0.82 for long and short sleepers). However, these trends fell short of statistical significance (t=1.44, p=.158, t=.88, p=.385, respectively). Furthermore, normal sleepers showed marginally higher overall Remote Associates Test posttest scores (r=.27, p=.100), particularly on the medium difficult items (r=.29, p=.071). Additionally, participants who objectively slept less reported feeling more stressed before the microeconomics test (r=-.35, p=.030). Conclusion(s): The results of this preliminary study indicate that insufficient sleep may impede innovative thinking and coping with stress, abilities that are essential for success in educational settings and beyond. Future research should randomly assign participants to short or normal time-in-bed durations and evaluate creativity and educational outcomes.