Dement & Kleitman Study Guide - AICE Psych Midterm 2022

Sleep and dreams study.

Aims

Overall, to investigate dreaming by observing the relationship between eye movement during sleep and dream recall.

Specifically…:

• To see if eye movement correlated with dream content

• To see if dream recall differs between REM and nREM sleep

• To see if dreamers could accurately estimate the amount of time they were in REM sleep.

EEG Purpose

Measured brain waves/activation during different stages of P’s sleep.

Stages of nREM Sleep

• Stages 1 + 2 = Asleep

  • Light sleep, theta waves

• Stages 3 + 4 = Deeper Sleep

  • Delta waves, difficult to wake someone.

Research Design

* Repeated Measures
* Included Self Reports (P’s dream narrative)

Sample

• 9 adults

  • 7 male, 2 female

  • 5 studied in detail. The remain 4’s results were used to confirm those of the main 5.

• Limited generalizability

Results of Predicting REM Length (5 minutes vs. 15 minutes)

• P’s performed very well!

  • High accuracy

• Dream narrative (self report) word count matched the duration of time that the P was in REM sleep.

  • For example, P’s woken after 5 minutes of REM sleep had a shorter dream narrative.

  • P’s woken after 15 minutes of REM sleep had a longer dream narrative