Age and Race-Related Differences in Sleep Discontinuity Linked to Associative Memory Performance and Its Neural Underpinnings

There is a strong relationship between sleep and memory for the details of past events. In old age, both episodic memory performance and related neural activity decline. These changes occur in parallel to age-related decreases in sleep quality. Thus, poor sleep quality may be an explanatory factor for poor memory in older adulthood. Furthermore, Black adults tend to sleep more poorly than White adults, and this could be explained by differences in health and psychosocial factors (e.g., socioeconomic status, race-related stress). However, there have been no studies investigating the effect of race on sleep quality, episodic memory, and memory-related neural function. In the current pilot study, we recruited a diverse sample of older and younger adults and measured their habitual sleep using a wrist-worn accelerometer for 1 week. We recorded their electroencephalography (EEG) as they performed an episodic memory task to assess the impact of habitual sleep on memory-related neural oscillations. We found that more variable sleep quality was associated with worse memory performance, particularly for older adults. Additionally, Black participants demonstrated greater intraindividual sleep variance than White participants, and greater sleep variance was strongly linked to reduced memory-related neural activity in Black participants. Taken together, maintaining good sleep quality is especially important for memory performance in older adulthood, and greater sleep variation, that is evident in Black adults, may hamper memory-related neural function.