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Poster C165 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Sleep Inspires Insight: a Preregistered Study
Anika Löwe1 (), Marit Petzka1, Maria Tzegka1, Nicolas Schuck1; 1UHH
Humans sometimes have insights, which is expressed in a sudden and drastic performance improvement on the task they are working on. While the origins of insights are unknown, previous work has suggested that insights require a form of memory restructuring that often occurs during sleep. In addition, computational work has suggested that neural variability could increase the likelihood of an insight. Although previous work has investigated sleep as a potentially enhancing factor of insights, the evidence for this idea has so far been mixed. One reason for this unclear picture could be that different sleep stages have differential effects on insights. To investigate the link of different sleep stages and variability to insight, we conducted a preregistered study in which N = 90 participants performed an insight task before and after a 20 minute daytime nap. We find that N2 sleep, but not N1 sleep increases the likelihood of insight moments after the nap, suggesting the need for deeper sleep in order to gain insight. Further, analyses of EEG power spectra showed that 1/f slopes could predict insight above and beyond sleep stages. Our findings thus point towards a role of N2 sleep and aperiodic, but not oscillatory, neural activity for insight.
Keywords: insight sleep learning aperiodic neural activity